Hyperion - Dan Simmons [EN]

THE
HUGO
AWARD —
WINNING
NOVEL

On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war,
seven pilgrims set forth on a voyage to the Time Tombs.
They seek the answers to the unsolved riddles of their
lives ... and what they find may hold the key to the
deliverance of humanity itself.

THE PRIEST—When he was young, Father Lenar Hoyt
honestly believed in the Roman Catholic Church—despite
the fact that history and change had made the Church
wither away. But now his faith is shaken, troubled by the fate
suffered on Hyperion by a man he once admired.

THE SOLDIER—Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was one of the
brightest, most capable, and toughest young officers in the
entire Hegemony military—until chance brought him to
Hyperion.

THE POET—There is something in Martin Silenus’s eyes
when he speaks of the Shrike. A hunger. Or something
more....

THE SCHOLAR—Sol Weintraub led a quiet life until his
daughter went to Hyperion on an archaeological
expedition ... where the Shrike touched her and sent her
reeling backward in time.

THE STARSHIP CAPTAIN—Quiet and easy-going—and
strangely confident—Het Masteen knows far more than he
reveals.

THE DETECTIVE—Brawne Lamia came to Hyperion to ferret
out a murderer—the murderer of a client who was under her
protection.

THE CONSUL—He seems quiet, reserved ... the perfect
functionary. Or is there something tortured inside him hiding
itself from view, intent on some unspeakable purpose?

n ———————

PRAISE FOR
HYPERION
and THE FALL OF HYPERION

“Generously conceived and stylistically sure-handed ... an
unfailingly inventive narrative that bears comparison with
such classics as Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series, Frank
Herbert’s ‘Dune’ and Gene Wolfe’s ‘Book of the New Sun.’ ”
— The New York Times Book Review

“Dan Simmons has brilliantly conceptualized a future 700
years distant. In sheer scope and complexity it matches, and
perhaps even surpasses, those of Isaac Asimov and James
Blish.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“An essential part of any science fiction collection ... this one
is sure to be read.”
— Booklist

“One of the finest SF novels published in the past few
years.”
— Science Fiction Eye

“A magnificently original blend of themes and styles.”
— The Denver Post

“Highly literate examples of what science-fiction can do; the
presence of these books—of this writer—will undoubtedly
have great impact on a genre that too often confines itself to
narrow hackwork.”

—St. Petersburg Times

“Hyperion (including The Fall of Hyperion) is state of the art
science fiction.... For me, | know that this work will be that
against which all future works will have to be measured, in
the same way, in their time, that Asimov’s Foundation series
and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness set new standards.
In short, it’s a landmark novel.”

—Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

“Simmons masterfully employs SF’s potential.”
—Locus

“Among the most literate of science-fiction novels, this one
replicates Canterbury Tales in a far-future universe on a
planet called Hyperion after John Keats’ poem.”

—Rocky Mountain News

BOOKS BY DAN SIMMONS

Song of Kali
Carrion Comfort
* Hyperion
* The Fall of Hyperion
Entropy’s Bed at Midnight
Summer of Night
* The Hollow Man
Children of the Night
Summer Sketches
Fires of Eden
* Endymion
* The Rise of Endymion

* Available from Bantam Books

HYPERION

DAN SIMMONS

Bi.
%,

BANTAM BOOKS
NEW YORK * TORONTO + LONDON + SYDNEY + AUCKLAND

All of the characters in this book
are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.

This edition contains the complete text
of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

HYPERION
A Bantam Spectra Book /published by arrangement with Doubleday

SPECTRA and the portrayal of the boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam
Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1989 by Dan Simmons.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-33407.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.

For information address: Doubleday.

elSBN: 978-0-307-78188-8
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a

rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.
Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

v3.1

This is for Ted

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author
Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

THE PRIEST’S TALE: THE MAN WHO CRIED GOD
Chapter 2

THE SOLDIER’S TALE: THE WAR LOVERS
Chapter 3

THE POET’S TALE: “HYPERION CANTOS”
Chapter 4

THE SCHOLAR’S TALE: THE RIVER LETHE’S TASTE IS
BITTER
Chapter 5

THE DETECTIVE’S TALE: THE LONG GOOD-BYE
Chapter 6

THE CONSUL’S TALE: REMEMBERING SIRI
Epilogue

About the Author
Preview

PROLOGUE

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony

Spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp
Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while
great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the
swamps below. A thunderstorm was brewing to the north.
Bruise-black clouds silhouetted a forest of giant
gymnosperms while stratocumulus towered nine kilometers
high in a violent sky. Lightning rippled along the horizon.
Closer to the ship, occasional vague, reptilian shapes would
blunder into the interdiction field, cry out, and then crash
away through indigo mists. The Consul concentrated on a
difficult section of the Prelude and ignored the approach of
storm and nightfall.

The fatline receiver chimed.

The Consul stopped, fingers hovering above the keyboard,
and listened. Thunder rumbled through the heavy air. From
the direction of the gymnosperm forest there came the
mournful ululation of a carrion-breed pack. Somewhere in
the darkness below, a small-brained beast trumpeted its
answering challenge and fell quiet. The interdiction field
added its sonic undertones to the sudden silence. The
fatline chimed again.

“Damn,” said the Consul and went in to answer it.

While the computer took a few seconds to convert and
decode the burst of decaying tachyons, the Consul poured
himself a glass of Scotch. He settled into the cushions of the
projection pit just as the diskey blinked green. “Play,” he
Said.

“You have been chosen to return to Hyperion,” came a
woman’s husky voice. Full visuals had not yet formed; the
air remained empty except for the pulse of transmission
codes which told the Consul that this fatline squirt had
originated on the Hegemony administrative world of Tau Ceti
Center the Consul did not need the transmission coordinates
to know this. The aged but still beautiful voice of Meina
Gladstone was unmistakable. “You have been chosen to
return to Hyperion as a member of the Shrike Pilgrimage,”
continued the voice.

The hell you say, thought the Consul and rose to leave the
pit.

“You and six others have been selected by the Church of
the Shrike and confirmed by the All Thing,” said Meina
Gladstone. “It is in the interest of the Hegemony that you
accept.”

The Consul stood motionless in the pit, his back to the
flickering transmission codes. Without turning, he raised his
glass and drained the last of the Scotch.

“The situation is very confused,” said Meina Gladstone.
Her voice was weary. “The consulate and Home Rule Council
fatlined us three standard weeks ago with the news that the
Time Tombs showed signs of opening. The anti-entropic
fields around them were expanding rapidly and the Shrike
has begun ranging as far south as the Bridle Range.”

The Consul turned and dropped into the cushions. A holo
had formed of Meina Gladstone’s ancient face. Her eyes
looked as tired as her voice sounded.

“A FORCE:space task force was immediately dispatched
from Parvati to evacuate the Hegemony citizens on Hyperion
before the Time Tombs open. Their time-debt will be a little
more than three Hyperion years.” Meina Gladstone paused.
The Consul thought he had never seen the Senate CEO look
so grim. “We do not know if the evacuation fleet will arrive in
time,” she said, “but the situation is even more complicated.
An Ouster migration cluster of at least four

thousand ... units ... has been detected approaching the
Hyperion system. Our evacuation task force should arrive
only a short while before the Ousters.”

The Consul understood Gladstone’s hesitation. An Ouster
migration cluster might consist of ships ranging in size from
single-person ramscouts to can cities and comet forts
holding tens of thousands of the interstellar barbarians.

“The FORCE joint chiefs believe that this is the Ousters’
big push,” said Meina Gladstone. The ships computer had
positioned the holo so that the woman’s sad brown eyes
seemed to be staring directly at the Consul. “Whether they
seek to control just Hyperion for the Time Tombs or whether
this is an all-out attack on the Worldweb remains to be seen.
In the meantime, a full FORCE:space battle fleet complete
with a farcaster construction battalion has spun up from the
Camn System to join the evacuation task force, but this fleet
may be recalled depending upon circumstances.”

The Consul nodded and absently raised the Scotch to his
lips. He frowned at the empty glass and dropped it onto the
thick carpeting of the holopit. Even with no military training
he understood the difficult tactical decision Gladstone and
the joint chiefs were faced with. Unless a military farcaster
were hurriedly constructed in the Hyperion system—at
staggering expense—there would be no way to resist the
Ouster invasion. Whatever secrets the Time Tombs might
hold would go to the Hegemony’s enemy. If the fleet did
construct a farcaster in time and the Hegemony committed
the total resources of FORCE to defending the single,
distant, colonial world of Hyperion, the Worldweb ran the
terrible risk of suffering an Ouster attack elsewhere on the
perimeter, or—in a worst-case scenario—having the
barbarians actually seizing the farcaster and penetrating the
Web itself. The Consul tried to imagine the reality of armored
Ouster troops stepping through farcaster portals into the
undefended home cities on a hundred worlds.

The Consul walked through the holo of Meina Gladstone,
retrieved his glass, and went to pour another Scotch.

“You have been chosen to join the pilgrimage to the
Shrike,” said the image of the old CEO whom the press loved
to compare to Lincoln or Churchill or Alvarez-Temp or
whatever other pre-Hegira legend was in historical vogue at
the time. “The Templars are sending their treeship
Yggdrasill’ said Gladstone, “and the evacuation task force
commander has instructions to let it pass. With a three-week
time-debt, you can rendezvous with the Yggdrasill before it
goes quantum from the Parvati system. The six other
pilgrims chosen by the Shrike Church will be aboard the
treeship. Our intelligence reports suggest that at least one
of the seven pilgrims is an agent of the Ousters. We do
not ... at this time ... have any way of knowing which one it
Is.”

The Consul had to smile. Among all the other risks
Gladstone was taking, the old woman had to consider the
possibility that he was the spy and that she was fatlining
crucial information to an Ouster agent. Or had she given him
any crucial information? The fleet movements were
detectable as soon as the ships used their Hawking drives,
and if the Consul were the spy, the CEO’s revelation might
be a way to scare him off. The Consul’s smile faded and he
drank his Scotch.

“Sol Weintraub and Fedmahn Kassad are among the seven
pilgrims chosen,” said Gladstone.

The Consul’s frown deepened. He stared at the cloud of
digits flickering like dust motes around the old woman’s
image. Fifteen seconds of fatline transmission time
remained.

“We need your help,” said Meina Gladstone. “It is essential
that the secrets of the Time Tombs and the Shrike be
uncovered. This pilgrimage may be our last chance. If the
Ousters conquer Hyperion, their agent must be eliminated

and the Time Tombs sealed at all cost. The fate of the
Hegemony may depend upon it.”

The transmission ended except for the pulse of
rendezvous coordinates. “Response?” asked the ship’s
computer. Despite the tremendous energies involved, the
Spacecraft was capable of placing a brief, coded squirt into
the incessant babble of FTL bursts which tied the human
portions of the galaxy together.

“No,” said the Consul and went outside to lean on the
balcony railing. Night had fallen and the clouds were low. No
stars were visible. The darkness would have been absolute
except for the intermittent flash of lightning to the north
and a soft phosphorescence rising from the marshes. The
Consul was suddenly very aware that he was, at that,
second, the only sentient being on an unnamed world. He
listened to the antediluvian night sounds rising from the
Swamps and he thought about morning, about setting out in
the Vikken EMV at first light, about spending the day in
sunshine, about hunting big game in the fern forests to the
south and then returning to the ship in the evening for a
good steak and a cold beer. The Consul thought about the
sharp pleasure of the hunt and the equally sharp solace of
solitude: solitude he had earned through the pain and
nightmare he had already suffered on Hyperion.

Hyperion.

The Consul went inside, brought the balcony in, and
sealed the ship just as the first heavy raindrops began to
fall. He climbed the spiral staircase to his sleeping cabin at
the apex of the ship. The circular room was dark except for
silent explosions of lightning which outlined rivulets of rain
coursing the skylight. The Consul stripped, lay back on the
firm mattress, and switched on the sound system and
external audio pickups. He listened as the fury of the storm
blended with the violence of Wagners “Flight of the
Valkyries.” Hurricane winds buffeted the ship. The sound of

thunderclaps filled the room as the skylight flashed white,
leaving afterimages burning in the Consul’s retinas.

Wagner is good only for thunderstorms, he thought. He
closed his eyes but the lightning was visible through closed
eyelids. He remembered the glint of ice crystals blowing
through the tumbled ruins on the low hills near the Time
Tombs and the colder gleam of steel on the Shrike’s
impossible tree of metal thorns. He remembered screams in
the night and the hundred-facet, ruby-and-blood gaze of the
Shrike itself.

Hyperion.

The Consul silently commanded the computer to shut off
all speakers and raised his wrist to cover his eyes. In the
sudden silence he lay thinking about how insane it would be
to return to Hyperion. During his eleven years as Consul on
that distant and enigmatic world, the mysterious Church of
the Shrike had allowed a dozen barges of off world pilgrims
to depart for the windswept barrens around the Time Tombs,
north of the mountains. No one had returned. And that had
been in normal times, when the Shrike had been prisoner to
the tides of time and forces no one understood, and the anti-
entropic fields had been contained to a few dozen meters
around the Time Tombs. And there had been no threat of an
Ouster invasion.

The Consul thought of the Shrike, free to wander
everywhere on Hyperion, of the millions of indigenies and
thousands of Hegemony citizens helpless before a creature
which defied physical laws and which communicated only
through death, and he shivered despite the warmth of the
cabin.

Hyperion.

The night and storm passed. Another stormfront raced
ahead of the approaching dawn. Gymnosperms two hundred
meters tall bent and whipped before the coming torrent. Just
before first light, the Consuls ebony spaceship rose on a tail

of blue plasma and punched through thickening clouds as it
climbed toward space and rendezvous.

The Consul awoke with the peculiar headache, dry throat,
and sense of having forgotten a thousand dreams which
only periods in cryogenic fugue could bring. He blinked, sat
upright on a low couch, and groggily pushed away the last
sensor tapes clinging to his skin. There were two very short
crew clones and one very tall, hooded Templar with him in
the windowless ovoid of a room. One of the clones offered
the Consul the traditional post-thaw glass of orange juice.
He accepted it and drank greedily.

“The Tree is two light-minutes and five hours of travel from
Hyperion,” said the Templar, and the Consul realized that he
was being addressed by Het Masteen, captain of the Templar
treeship and True Voice of the Tree. The Consul vaguely
realized that it was a great honor to be awakened by the
Captain, but he was too groggy and disoriented from fugue
to appreciate it.

“The others have been awake for some hours,” said Het
Masteen and gestured for the clones to leave them. “They
have assembled on the foremost dining platform.”

“Hhrghn,” said the Consul and took a drink. He cleared his
throat and tried again. “Thank you, Het Masteen,” he
managed. Looking around at the egg-shaped room with its
carpet of dark grass, translucent walls, and support ribs of
continuous, curved weirwood, the Consul realized that he
must be in one of the smaller environment pods. Closing his
eyes, he tried to recall his memories of rendezvous just
before the Templar ship went quantum.

The Consul remembered his first glimpse of the kilometer-
long treeship as he closed for rendezvous, the treeship’s

details blurred by the redundant machine and erg-generated
containment fields which surrounded it like a spherical mist,
but its leafy bulk clearly ablaze with thousands of lights
which shone softly through leaves and thin-walled
environment pods, or along countless platforms, bridges,
command decks, stairways, and bowers. Around the base of
the treeship, engineering and cargo spheres clustered like
oversized galls while blue and violet drive streamers trailed
behind like ten-kilometer-long roots.

“The others await,” Het Masteen said softly and nodded
toward low cushions where the Consul’s luggage lay ready
to open upon his command. The Templar gazed thoughtfully
at the weirwood rafters while the Consul dressed in
semiformal evening wear of loose black trousers, polished
ship boots, a white silk blouse which ballooned at waist and
elbows, topaz collar cinch, black demi-coat complete with
slashes of Hegemony crimson on the epaulets, and a soft
gold tricorne. A section of curved wall became a mirror and
the Consul stared at the image there: a more than middle-
aged man in semiformal evening wear, sunburned skin but
oddly pale under the sad eyes. The Consul frowned, nodded,
and turned away.

Het Masteen gestured and the Consul followed the tall,
robed figure through a dilation in the pod onto an ascending
walkway which curved up and out of sight around the
massive bark wall of the treeship’s trunk. The Consul
paused, moved to the edge of the walkway, and took a quick
step back. It was at least six hundred meters down—down
being created by the one-sixth standard gravity being
generated by the singularities imprisoned at the base of the
tree—and there were no railings.

They resumed their silent ascent, turning off from the
main trunk walkway thirty meters and half a trunk-spiral
later to cross a flimsy Suspension bridge to a five-meter-wide
branch. They followed this outward to where the riot of
leaves caught the glare of Hyperion’s sun.

“Has my ship been brought out of storage?” asked the
Consul.

“It is fueled and ready in sphere 11,” said Het Masteen.
They passed into the shadow of the trunk and stars became
visible in the black patches between the dark latticework of
leaves. “The other pilgrims have agreed to ferry down in
your ship if the FORCE authorities give permission,” added
the Templar.

The Consul rubbed his eyes and wished that he had been
allowed more time to retrieve his wits from the cold grip of
cryonic fugue. “You've been in touch with the task force?”

“Oh, yes, we were challenged the moment we tunneled
down from quantum leap. A Hegemony warship
is ... escorting us ... this very moment.” Het Masteen
gestured toward a patch of sky above them.

The Consul squinted upward but at that second segments
of the upper tiers of branches revolved out of the treeship’s
Shadow and acres of leaves ignited in sunset hues. Even in
the still shadowed places, glowbirds nestled like Japanese
lanterns above lighted walkways, glowing swingvines, and
illuminated hanging bridges, while fireflies from Old Earth
and radiant gossamers from Maui-Covenant blinked and
coded their way through labyrinths of leaves, mixing with
constellations sufficiently to fool even the most starwise
traveler.

Het Masteen stepped into a basket lift hanging from a
whiskered-carbon cable which disappeared into the three
hundred meters of tree above them. The Consul followed
and they were borne silently upward. He noted that the
walkways, pods, and platforms were conspicuously empty
except for a few Templars and their diminutive crew clone
counterparts. The Consul could recall seeing no other
passengers during his rushed hour between rendezvous and
fugue, but he had put that down to the imminence of the
treeship going quantum, assuming then that the passengers
were Safe in their fugue couches. Now, however, the treeship

was traveling for below relativistic velocities and its
branches should be crowded with gawking passengers. He
mentioned his observation to the Templar.

“The six of you are our only passengers,” said Het
Masteen. The basket stopped in a maze of foliage and the
treeship captain led the way up a wooden escalator worn
with age.

The Consul blinked in surprise. A Templar treeship
normally carried between two and five thousand passengers;
it was easily the most desirable way to travel between the
stars. Treeships rarely accrued more than a four- or five-
month time-debt, making short, scenic crossings where star
systems were a very few light-years apart, thus allowing
their affluent passengers to spend as little time as necessary
in fugue. For the treeship to make the trip to Hyperion and
back, accumulating six years of Web time with no paying
passengers would mean a staggering financial loss to the
Templars.

Then the Consul realized, belatedly, that the treeship
would be ideal for the upcoming evacuation, its expenses
ultimately to be reimbursed by the Hegemony. Still, the
Consul knew, to bring a ship as beautiful and vulnerable as
the Yggdrasill—one of only five of its kind—into a war zone
was a terrible risk for the Templar Brotherhood.

“Your fellow pilgrims,” announced Het Masteen as he and
the Consul emerged onto a broad platform where a small
group waited at one end of a long wooden table. Above
them the stars burned, rotating occasionally as the treeship
changed its pitch or yaw, while to either side a solid sphere
of foliage curved away like the green skin of some great
fruit. The Consul immediately recognized the setting as the
Captain’s dining platform, even before the five other
passengers rose to let Het Masteen take his place at the
head of the table. The Consul found an empty chair waiting
for him to the left of the Captain.

When everyone was seated and quiet, Het Masteen made
formal introductions. Although the Consul knew none of the
others from personal experience, several of the names were
familiar and he used his diplomat’s long training to file away
identities and impressions.

To the Consul’s left sat Father Lenar Hoyt, a priest of the
old-style Christian sect known as Catholic. For a second the
Consul had forgotten the significance of the black clothing
and Roman collar, but then he remembered St. Francis
Hospital on Hebron where he had received alcohol trauma
therapy after his disastrous first diplomatic assignment
there almost four standard decades earlier. And at the
mention of Hoyt’s name he remembered another priest, one
who had disappeared on Hyperion halfway through his own
tenure there.

Lenar Hoyt was a young man by the Consul’s reckoning—
no more than his early thirties—but it appeared that
something had aged the man terribly in the not too distant
past. The Consul looked at the thin face, cheekbones
pressing against sallow flesh, eyes large but hooded in deep
hollows, thin lips set in a permanent twitch of muscle too
downturned to be called even a cynical smile, the hairline
not so much receding as ravaged by radiation, and he felt he
was looking at a man who had been ill for years. Still, the
Consul was surprised that behind that mask of concealed
pain there remained the physical echo of the boy in the man
—the faintest remnants of the round face, fair skin, and soft
mouth which had belonged to a younger, healthier, less
cynical Lenar Hoyt.

Next to the priest sat a man whose image had been
familiar to most citizens of the Hegemony some years
before. The Consul wondered if the collective attention span
in the Worldweb was as short now as it had been when he
had lived there. Shorter, probably. If so, then Colonel
Fedmahn Kassad, the so-called Butcher of South Bressia,
was probably no longer either infamous or famous. To the

Consul’s generation and to all those who lived in the slow,
expatriate fringe of things, Kassad was not someone one was
likely to forget.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad was tall—almost tall enough to
look the two-meter Het Masteen in the eye—and dressed in
FORCE black with no rank insignia or citations showing. The
black uniform was oddly similar to Father Hoyt’s garb, but
there was no real resemblance between the two men. In lieu
of Hoyt’s wasted appearance, Kassad was brown, obviously
fit, and whip-handle lean, with strands of muscle showing in
shoulder, wrist, and throat. The Colonel’s eyes were small,
dark, and as all-encompassing as the lenses of some
primitive video camera. His face was all angles: shadows,
planes, and facets. Not gaunt like Father Hoyt’s, merely
carved from cold stone. A thin line of beard along his jawline
served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely
as blood on a knife blade.

The Colonel’s intense, slow movements reminded the
Consul of an Earth-bred jaguar he had seen in a private
seedship zoo on Lusus many years before. Kassad’s voice
was soft but the Consul did not fail to notice that even the
Colonel’s silences commanded attention.

Most of the long table was empty, the group clustered at
one end. Across from Fedmahn Kassad sat a man introduced
as the poet Martin Silenus.

Silenus appeared to be quite the opposite of the military
man across from him. Where Kassad was lean and tall,
Martin Silenus was short and visibly out of shape.
Countering Kassad’s stone-cut features, the poet’s face was
as mobile and expressive as an Earth primate’s. His voice
was a loud, profane rasp. There was something, thought the
Consul, almost pleasantly demonic about Martin Silenus,
with his ruddy cheeks, broad mouth, pitched eyebrows,
sharp ears, and constantly moving hands sporting fingers
long enough to serve a concert pianist. Or a strangler. The
poet’s silver hair had been cropped into rough-hewn bangs.

Martin Silenus seemed to be in his late fifties, but the
Consul noticed the telltale blue tinge to throat and palms
and suspected that the man had been through more than a
few Poulsen treatments. Silenus’s true age might be
anywhere from ninety to a hundred and fifty standard years.
If he were close to the latter age, the Consul knew, the odds
were that the poet was quite mad.

As boisterous and animated as Martin Silenus seemed
upon first encounter, so the next guest at the table exuded
an immediate and equally impressive sense of intelligent
reticence. Sol Weintraub looked up upon introduction and
the Consul noted the short gray beard, lined forehead, and
sad, luminous eyes of the well-known scholar. The Consul
had heard tales of the Wandering Jew and his hopeless
quest, but he was shocked to realize that the old man now
held the infant in his arms—his daughter Rachel, no more
than a few weeks old. The Consul looked away.

The sixth pilgrim and only woman at the table was Brawne
Lamia. When introduced, the detective stared at the Consul
with such intensity that he could feel the pressure of her
gaze even after she looked away.

A former citizen of the 1.3-g world of Lusus, Brawne Lamia
was no taller than the poet two chairs to her right, but even
her loose corduroy shipsuit did not conceal the heavy layers
of muscle on her compact form. Black curls reached to her
shoulders, her eyebrows were two dark lines dabbed
horizontally across a wide brow, and her nose was solid and
sharp, intensifying the aquiline quality of her stare. Lamia’s
mouth was wide and expressive to the point of being
sensuous, curled slightly at the corners in a slight smile
which might be cruel or merely playful. The woman’s dark
eyes seemed to dare the observer to discover which was the
case.

It occurred to the Consul that Brawne Lamia might well be
considered beautiful.

Introductions completed, the Consul cleared his throat and
turned toward the Templar. “Het Masteen, you said that
there were seven pilgrims. Is M. Weintraub’s child the
seventh?”

Het Masteen’s hood moved slowly from side to side. “No.
Only those who make a conscious decision to seek the
Shrike may be counted among the pilgrims.”

The group at the table stirred slightly. Each must know
what the Consul knew; only a group comprising a prime
number of pilgrims might make the Shrike Church-sponsored
trip north.

“I am the seventh,” said Het Masteen, captain of the
Templar treeship Yggdrasill and True Voice of the Tree. In the
silence which followed the announcement, Het Masteen
gestured and a group of crew clones began serving the
pilgrims their last meal before planetfall.

“So the Ousters are not in-system yet?” asked Brawne
Lamia. Her voice had a husky, throaty quality which
strangely stirred the Consul.

“No,” said Het Masteen. “But we cannot be more than a
few standard days ahead of them. Our instruments have
detected fusion skirmishes within the system’s Oort cloud.”

“Will there be war?” asked Father Hoyt. His voice seemed
as fatigued as his expression. When no one volunteered a
response, the priest turned to his right as if retroactively
directing the question to the Consul.

The Consul sighed. The crew clones had served wine; he
wished it had been whiskey. “Who knows what the Ousters
will do?” he said. “They no longer appear to be motivated by
human logic.”

Martin Silenus laughed loudly, spilling his wine as he
gestured. “As if we fucking humans were ever motivated by
human logic!” He took a deep drink, wiped his mouth, and
laughed again.

Brawne Lamia frowned. “If the serious fighting starts too
soon,” she said, “perhaps the authorities will not allow us to
land.”

“We will be allowed to pass,” said Het Masteen. Sunlight
found its way past folds in his cowl to fall on yellowish skin.

“Saved from certain death in war to be delivered to certain
death at the hands of the Shrike,” murmured Father Hoyt.

“There is no death in all the Universe!” intoned Martin
Silenus in a voice which the Consul felt sure could have
awakened someone deep in cryogenic fugue. The poet
drained the last of his wine and raised the empty goblet in
an apparent toast to the stars:

“No smell of death—there shall be no death, moan, moan;
Moan, Cybele, moan; for thy pernicious Babes

Have changed a god into a shaking palsy.

Moan, brethren, moan, for I have no strength left;

Weak as the reed—weak—feeble as my voice—

Oh, oh, the pain, the pain of feebleness.

Moan, moan, for still | thaw....”

Silenus abruptly broke off and poured more wine, belching
once into the silence which had followed his recitation. The
other six looked at one another. The Consul noticed that Sol
Weintraub was smiling slightly until the baby in his arms
stirred and distracted him.

“Well,” said Father Hoyt hesitantly, as if trying to retrieve
an earlier strand of thought, “if the Hegemony convoy
leaves and the Ousters take Hyperion, perhaps the
occupation will be bloodless and they'll let us go about our
business.”

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad laughed softly. “The Ousters
don’t want to occupy Hyperion,” he said. “If they take the
planet they'll loot what they want and then do what they do
best. They’ll burn the cities into charred rubble, break the
rubble into smaller pieces, and then bake the pieces until

they glow. They’ll melt the poles, boil the oceans, and then
use the residue to salt what’s left of the continents so
nothing will ever grow there again.”

“Well ...” began Father Hoyt and then trailed off.

There was no conversation as the clones cleared the soup
and salad dishes and brought on the main course.

“You said that there was a Hegemony warship escorting
us,” the Consul said to Het Masteen as they finished their
roast beef and boiled sky squid.

The Templar nodded and pointed. The Consul squinted but
could make out nothing moving against the rotating
Starfield.

“Here,” said Fedmahn Kassad and leaned across Father
Hoyt to hand the Consul a collapsible pair of military
binoculars.

The Consul nodded his thanks, thumbed on the power,
and scanned the patch of sky Het Masteen had indicated.
Gyroscopic crystals in the binoculars hummed slightly as
they stabilized the optics and swept the area in a
programmed search pattern. Suddenly the image froze,
blurred, expanded, and steadied.

The Consul could not avoid an involuntary intake of breath
as the Hegemony ship filled the viewer. Neither the
expected field-blurred seed of a solo ramscout nor the bulb
of a torchship, the electronically outlined image was of a
matte-black attack carrier. The thing was impressive in the
way only warships through the centuries had succeeded in
being. The Hegemony spinship was incongruously
streamlined with its four sets of boom arms retracted in
battle readiness, its sixty-meter command probe sharp as a
Clovis point, and its Hawking drive and fusion blisters set far
back along the launch shaft like feathers on an arrow.

The Consul handed the binoculars back to Kassad without
comment. If the task force was using a full attack carrier to

escort the Yggdrasill, what kind of firepower were they
setting in place to meet the Ouster invasion?

“How long until we land?” asked Brawne Lamia. She had
been using her comlog to access the treeship’s datasphere
and obviously was frustrated with what she had found. Or
had not found.

“Four hours until orbit,” murmured Het Masteen. “A few
minutes more by dropship. Our consular friend has offered
his private craft to ferry you down.”

“To Keats?” said Sol Weintraub. It was the first time the
scholar had spoken since dinner had been served.

The Consul nodded. “It’s still the only spaceport on
Hyperion set to handle passenger vehicles,” he said.

“Spaceport?” Father Hoyt sounded angry. “I thought that
we were going straight to the north. To the Shrike’s realm.”

Het Masteen patiently shook his head. “The pilgrimage
always begins from the capital,” he said. “It will take several
days to reach the Time Tombs.”

“Several days,” snapped Brawne Lamia. “That’s absurd.”

“Perhaps,” agreed Het Masteen, “but it is the case,
nonetheless.”

Father Hoyt looked as if something in the meal had caused
him indigestion even though he had eaten almost nothing.
“Look,” he said, “couldn’t we change the rules this once—I
mean, given the war scare and all? And just land near the
Time Tombs or wherever and get it over with?”

The Consul shook his head. “Spacecraft and aircraft have
been trying to take the short route to the northern moors for
almost four hundred years,” he said. “I know of none who
made it.”

“May one inquire,” said Martin Silenus, happily raising his
hand like a schoolboy, “just what the gibbering fuck
happens to these legions of ships?”

Father Hoyt frowned at the poet. Fedmahn Kassad smiled
Slightly.

Sol Weintraub said, “The Consul did not mean to suggest
that the area is inaccessible. One may travel by ship or
various land routes. Nor do spacecraft and aircraft disappear.
They easily land near the ruins or the Time Tombs and just
as easily return to whatever point their computers
command. It is merely the pilots and passengers who are
never seen again.” Weintraub lifted the sleeping baby from
his lap and set her in an infant carrier slung around his neck.

“So the tired old legend goes,” said Brawne Lamia. “What
do the ship logs show?”

“Nothing,” said the Consul. “No violence. No forced entry.
No deviation from course. No unexplained time lapses. No
unusual energy emissions or depletions. No physical
phenomena of any sort.”

“No passengers,” said Het Masteen.

The Consul did a slow double take. If Het Masteen had,
indeed, just attempted a joke, it was the first sign in all of
the Consul’s decades of dealing with the Templars that one
of them had shown even a nascent sense of humor. What the
Consul could see of the Captain’s vaguely oriental features
beneath the cowl gave no hint that a joke had been
attempted.

“Marvelous melodrama,” laughed Silenus. “A real-life,
Christ-weeping Sargasso of Souls and we're for it. Who
orchestrates this shitpot of a plot, anyway?”

“Shut up,” said Brawne Lamia. “You’re drunk, old man.”

The Consul sighed. The group had been together for less
than a standard hour.

Crew clones swept away the dishes and brought dessert
trays showcasing sherbets, coffees, treeship fruits, draums,
tortes, and concoctions made of Renaissance chocolate.
Martin Silenus waved away the desserts and told the clones
to bring him another bottle of wine. The Consul reflected a
few seconds and then asked for a whiskey.

“It occurs to me,” Sol Weintraub said as the group was
finishing dessert, “that our survival may depend upon our
talking to one another.”

“What do you mean?” asked Brawne Lamia.

Weintraub unconsciously rocked the child sleeping against
his chest. “For instance, does anyone here know why he or
she was chosen by the Shrike Church and the All Thing to go
on this voyage?”

No one spoke.

“I thought not,” said Weintraub. “Even more fascinating, is
anyone here a member or follower of the Church of the
Shrike? |, for one, am a Jew, and however confused my
religious notions have become these days, they do not
include the worship of an organic killing machine.”
Weintraub raised heavy eyebrows and looked around the
table.

“I am the True Voice of the Tree,” said Het Masteen. “While
many Templars believe that the Shrike is the Avatar of
punishment for those who do not feed from the root, | must
consider this a heresy not founded in the Covenant or the
writings of Muir.”

To the Captain’s left, the Consul shrugged. “I am an
atheist,” he said, holding the glass of whiskey to the light. “l
have never been in contact with the Shrike cult.”

Father Hoyt smiled without humor, “The Catholic Church
ordained me,” he said. “Shrike-worship contradicts
everything the Church defends.”

Colonel Kassad shook his head, whether in refusal to
respond or to indicate that he was not a member of the
Shrike Church, it was not clear.

Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. “I was
baptized a Lutheran,” he said. “A subset which no longer
exists. | helped create Zen Gnosticism before any of your
parents were born. | have been a Catholic, a revelationist, a
neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound Shaker, a satanist,

a bishop in the Church of Jake’s Nada, and a dues-paying
subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, | am
happy to say, | am a simple pagan.” He smiled at everyone.
“To a pagan,” he concluded, “the Shrike is a most acceptable
deity.”

“I ignore religions,” said Brawne Lamia. “I do not succumb
to them.”

“My point has been made, | believe,” said Sol Weintraub.
“None of us admits to subscribing to the Shrike cult dogma,
yet the elders of that perceptive group have chosen us over
many millions of the petitioning faithful to visit the Time
Tombs ... and their fierce god ... in what may be the last
such pilgrimage.”

The Consul shook his head. “Your point may be made, M.
Weintraub,” he said, “but | fail to see it.”

The scholar absently stroked his beard. “It would seem
that our reasons for returning to Hyperion are so compelling
that even the Shrike Church and the Hegemony probability
intelligences agree that we deserve to return,” he said.
“Some of these reasons—mine, for instance—may appear to
be public knowledge, but | am certain that none are known
in their entirety except to the individuals at this table. |
suggest that we share our stories in the few days remaining
to us.”

“Why?” said Colonel Kassad. “It would seem to serve no
purpose.”

Weintraub smiled. “On the contrary, it would—at the very
least—amuse us and give at least a glimpse of our fellow
travelers’ souls before the Shrike or some other calamity
distracts us. Beyond that, it might just give us enough
insight to save all of our lives if we are intelligent enough to
find the common thread of experience which binds all our
fates to the whim of the Shrike.”

Martin Silenus laughed and closed his eyes. He said:

“Straddling each a dolphin’s back
And steadied by a fin,

Those Innocents re-live their death,
Their wounds open again.”

“That’s Lenista, isn’t it?” said Father Hoyt. “I studied her in
seminary.”

“Close,” said Silenus, opening his eyes and pouring more
wine.

“It’s Yeats. Bugger lived five hundred years before Lenista
tugged at her mother’s metal teat.”

“Look,” said Lamia, “what good would telling each other
stories do? When we meet the Shrike, we tell it what we
want, one of us is granted the wish, and the others die.
Correct?”

“So goes the myth,” said Weintraub.

“The Shrike is no myth,” said Kassad. “Nor its steel tree.”

“So why bore each other with stories?” asked Brawne
Lamia, spearing the last of her chocolate cheesecake.

Weintraub gently touched the back of his sleeping infant’s
head. “We live in strange times,” he said. “Because we are
part of that one tenth of one tenth of one percent of the
Hegemony’s citizens who travel between the stars rather
than along the Web, we represent odd epochs of our own
recent past. |, for example, am sixty-eight standard years
old, but because of the time-debts my travels could have
incurred, | might have spread these threescore and eight
years across well more than a century of Hegemony history.”

“So?” said the woman next to him.

Weintraub opened his hand in a gesture which included
everyone at the table. “Among us we represent islands of
time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps
more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no
one else has been able to solve since humankind first
landed on Hyperion.” Weintraub scratched his nose. “It is a
mystery,” he said, “and to tell the truth, | am intrigued by

mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying
them. | would welcome some glimmer of understanding but,
failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.”

“I agree,” said Het Masteen with no emotion. “It had not
occurred to me, but | see the wisdom of telling our tales
before we confront the Shrike.”

“But what’s to keep us from lying?” asked Brawne Lamia.

“Nothing.” Martin Silenus grinned. “That’s the beauty of
it.”

“We should put it to a vote,” said the Consul. He was
thinking about Meina Gladstone’s contention that one of the
group was an Ouster agent. Would hearing the stories be a
way of revealing the spy? The Consul smiled at the thought
of an agent so stupid.

“Who decided that we are a happy little democracy?”
Colonel Kassad asked dryly.

“We had better be,” said, the Consul. “To reach our
individual goals, this group needs to reach the Shrike
regions together. We require some means of making
decisions.”

“We could appoint a leader,” said Kassad.

“Piss on that,” the poet said in a pleasant tone. Others at
the table also shook their heads.

“All right,” said the Consul, “we vote. Our first decision
relates to M. Weintraub’s suggestion that we tell the stories
of our past involvement with Hyperion.”

“All or nothing,” said Het Masteen. “We each share our
story or none does. We will abide by the will of the majority.”

“Agreed,” said the Consul, suddenly curious to hear the
others tell their stories and equally sure that he would never
tell his own. “Those in favor of telling our tales?”

“Yes,” said Sol Weintraub.

“Yes,” said Het Masteen.

“Absolutely,” said Martin Silenus. “I wouldn’t miss this
little comic farce for a month in the orgasm baths on Shote.”

“| vote yes also,” said the Consul, surprising himself.
“Those opposed?”

“Nay,” said Father Hoyt but there was no energy in his
voice.

“I think it’s stupid,” said Brawne Lamia.

The Consul turned to Kassad. “Colonel?”

Fedmahn Kassad shrugged.

“| register four yes votes, two negatives, and one
abstention,” said the Consul. “The ayes have it. Who wants
to start?”

The table was silent. Finally Martin Silenus looked up from
where he had been writing on a small pad of paper. He tore a
sheet into several smaller strips. “I’ve recorded numbers
from one to seven,” he said. “Why don’t we draw lots and go
in the order we draw?”

“That seems rather childish, doesn’t it?” said M. Lamia.

“I’m a childish fellow,” responded Silenus with his satyr’s
smile. “Ambassador”—he nodded toward the Consul—“could
| borrow that gilded pillow you’re wearing for a hat?”

The Consul handed over his tricorne, the folded slips were
dropped in, and the hat passed around. Sol Weintraub was
the first to draw, Martin Silenus the last.

The Consul unfolded his slip, making sure that no one else
could see it. He was number seven. Tension ebbed out of him
like air out of an overinflated balloon. It was quite possible,
he reasoned, that events would intercede before he had to
tell his story. Or the war would make everything academic.
Or the group could lose interest in stories. Or the king could
die. Or the horse could die. Or he could teach the horse how
to talk.

No more whiskey, thought the Consul.

“Who’s first?” asked Martin Silenus.

In the brief silence, the Consul could hear leaves stirring to
unfelt breezes.

“lam,” said Father Hoyt. The priest’s expression showed
the same barely submerged acceptance of pain which the

Consul had seen on the faces of terminally ill friends. Hoyt
held up his slip of paper with a large | clearly scrawled on it.

“All right,” said Silenus. “Start.”

“Now?” asked the priest.

“Why not?” said the poet. The only sign that Silenus had
finished at least two bottles of wine was a slight darkening
of the already ruddy cheeks and a somewhat more demonic
tilt to the pitched eyebrows. “We have a few hours before
planetfall,” he said, “and | for one plan to sleep off the
freezer fugue when we're safely down and settled among
the simple natives.”

“Our friend has a point,” Sol Weintraub said softly. “If the
tales are to be told, the hour after dinner each day is a
civilized time to tell them.”

Father Hoyt sighed and stood. “Just a minute,” he said and
left the dining platform.

After some minutes had passed, Brawne Lamia said, “Do
you think he’s lost his nerve?”

“No,” said Lenar Hoyt, emerging from the darkness at the
head of the wooden escalator which served as the main
staircase. “| needed these.” He dropped two small, stained
notebooks on the table as he took his seat.

“No fair reading stories from a primer,” said Silenus.
“These are to be our own tall tales, Magus!”

“Shut up, damn it!” cried Hoyt. He ran a hand across his
face, touched his chest. For the second time that night, the
Consul knew that he was looking at a seriously ill man.

“I’m sorry,” said Father Hoyt. “But if I’m to tell my ... my
tale, | have to tell someone else’s story as well. These
journals belong to the man who was the reason for my
coming to Hyperion ... and why | am returning today.” Hoyt
took a deep breath.

The Consul touched the journals. They were begrimed and
charred, as if they had survived a fire. “Your friend has old-
fashioned tastes,” he said, “if he still keeps a written
journal.”

“Yes,” said Hoyt. “If you’re all ready, | will begin.”

The group at the table nodded. Beneath the dining
platform, a kilometer of treeship drove through the cold
night with the strong pulse of a living thing. Sol Weintraub
lifted his sleeping child from the infant carrier and carefully
set her on a cushioned mat on the floor near his chair. He
removed his comlog, set it near the mat, and programmed
the diskey for white noise. The week-old infant lay on her
stomach and slept.

The Consul leaned far back and found the blue and green
star which was Hyperion. It seemed to grow larger even as
he watched. Het Masteen drew his cowl forward until only
shadows showed for his face. Sol Weintraub lighted a pipe.
Others accepted refills of coffee and settled back in their
chairs.

Martin Silenus seemed the most avid and expectant of the
listeners as he leaned forward and whispered:

“He seyde, ‘Syn I shal bigynne the game,
What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!
Now lat us ryde, and herkneth what I seye.’
And with that word we ryden forth oure weye;
And he bigan with right a myrie cheere

His tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere.”

THE PRIEST’S TALE:
THE MAN WHO CRIED GOD

4a S ometimes there is a thin line separating orthodox zeal
from apostasy,” said Father Lenar Hoyt.

So began the priest’s story. Later, dictating the tale into
his comlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole,
minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small
redundancies which were the timeless failings of human
speech.

Lenar Hoyt had been a young priest, born, raised, and only
recently ordained on the Catholic world of Pacem, when he
was given his first offworld assignment: he was ordered to
escort the respected Jesuit Father Paul Duré into quiet exile
on the colony world of Hyperion.

In another time, Father Paul Duré certainly would have
become a bishop and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with
white hair receding from a noble brow and eyes too filled
with the sharp edge of experience to hide their pain, Paul
Duré was a follower of St. Teilhard as well as an
archaeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian.
Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what
amounted to a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its
quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony
life, Jesuit logic had not lost its bite. Nor had Father Duré lost
his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church
continued to be humankind’s last, best hope for immortality.

To Lenar Hoyt as a boy, Father Duré had been a somewhat
godlike figure when glimpsed during his rare visits to the
preseminary schools, or on the would-be seminarian’s even
rarer visits to the New Vatican. Then, during the years of
Hoyt’s study in seminary, Duré had been on an important
Church-sponsored archaeological dig on the nearby world of
Armaghast. When the Jesuit returned, a few weeks after
Hoyt’s ordination, it had been under a cloud. No one outside
the highest circles of the New Vatican knew precisely what
had happened, but there were whispers of excommunication
and even of a hearing before the Holy Office of the
Inquisition, dormant the four centuries since the confusion
following the death of Earth.

Instead, Father Duré had asked for a posting to Hyperion, a
world most people knew of only because of the bizarre
Shrike cult which had originated there, and Father Hoyt had
been chosen to accompany him. It would be a thankless job,
traveling in a role which combined the worst aspects of
apprentice, escort, and spy without even the satisfaction of
seeing a new world; Hoyt was under orders to see Father
Duré down to the Hyperion spaceport and then reboard the
Same spinship for its return voyage to the Worldweb. What
the bishopric was offering Lenar Hoyt was twenty months in
cryogenic fugue, a few weeks of in-system travel at either
end of the voyage, and a time-debt which would return him
to Pacem eight years behind his former classmates in the
quest for Vatican careers and missionary postings.

Bound by obedience and schooled in discipline, Lenar
Hoyt accepted without question.

Their transport, the aging spinship HS Nadia Oleg, was a
pockmarked metal tub with no artificial gravity of any sort
when it was not under drive, no viewports for the
passengers, and no on-board recreation except for the
stimsims piped into the datalink to keep passengers in their
hammocks and fugue couches. After awakening from fugue,
the passengers—mostly offworld workers and economy-rate
tourists with a few cult mystics and would-be Shrike suicides
thrown in for good measure—slept in those same hammocks
and fugue couches, ate recycled food in featureless mess
decks, and generally tried to cope with spacesickness and
boredom during their twelve-day, zero-g glide from their
Spinout point to Hyperion.

Father Hoyt learned little from Father Duré during those
days of forced intimacy, nothing at all about the events on
Armaghast which had sent the senior priest into exile. The
younger man had keyed his comlog implant to seek out as
much data as it could on Hyperion and, by the time they
were three days out from planetfall, Father Loyt considered
himself somewhat of an expert on the world.

“There are records of Catholics coming to Hyperion but no
mention of a diocese there,” said Hoyt one evening as they
hung talking in their zero-g hammocks while most of their
fellow passengers lay tuned into erotic stimsims. “I presume
you’re going down to do some mission work?”

“Not at all,” replied Father Duré. “The good people of
Hyperion have done nothing to foist their religious opinions
on me, so | see no reason to offend them with my
proselytizing. Actually, | hope to travel to the southern
continent—Aquila—and then find a way inland from the city
of Port Romance. But not in the guise of a missionary. | plan
to set up an ethnological research station along the Cleft.”

“Research?” Father Hoyt had echoed in surprise. He closed
his eyes to key his implant. Looking again at Father Duré, he
said, “That section of the Pinion Plateau isn’t inhabited,
Father. The flame forests make it totally inaccessible most of
the year.”

Father Duré smiled and nodded. He carried no implant and
his ancient comlog had been in his luggage for the duration
of the trip. “Not quite inaccessible,” he said softly. “And not
quite uninhabited. The Bikura live there.”

“Bikura,” Father Hoyt said and closed his eyes. “But
they’re just a legend,” he said at last.

“Hmmm,” said Father Duré. “Try cross-indexing through
Mamet Spedling.”

Father Hoyt closed his eyes again. General Index told him
that Mamet Spedling had been a minor explorer affiliated
with the Shackleton Institute on Renaissance Minor who,
almost a standard century and a half earlier, had filed a
short report with the Institute in which he told of hacking his
way inland from the then newly settled Port Romance,
through swamplands which had since been reclaimed for
fiberplastic plantations, passing through the flame forests
during a period of rare quietude, and climbing high enough
on the Pinion Plateau to encounter the Cleft and a small
tribe of humans who fit the profile of the legendary Bikura.

Spedling’s brief notes hypothesized that the humans were
survivors of a missing seedship colony from three centuries
earlier and clearly described a group suffering all of the
classic retrograde cultural effects of extreme isolation,
inbreeding, and overadaptation. In Spedling’s blunt words,
“.. even after less than two days here it is obvious that the
Bikura are too stupid, lethargic, and dull to waste time
describing.” As it turned out, the flame forests then began to
show some signs of becoming active and Spedling had not
wasted any more time observing his discovery but had
rushed to reach the coast, losing four indigenie bearers, all
of his equipment and records, and his left arm to the “quiet”
forest in the three months it took him to escape.

“My God,” Father Hoyt had said as he lay in his hammock
on the Nadia Oleg, “why the Bikura?”

“Why not?” had been Father Duré’s mild reply. “Very little
is Known about them.”

“Very little is known about most of Hyperion,” said the
younger priest, becoming somewhat agitated. “What about
the Time Tombs and the legendary Shrike north of the Bridle
Range on Equus?” he said. “They’re famous!”

“Precisely,” said Father Duré. “Lenar, how many learned
papers have been written on the Tombs and the Shrike
creature? Hundreds? Thousands?” The aging priest had
tamped in tobacco and now lighted his pipe: no small feat in
zero-g, Hoyt observed. “Besides,” said Paul Duré, “even if
the Shrike-thing is real, it is not human. | am partial to
human beings.”

“Yes,” said Hoyt, ransacking his mental arsenal for potent
arguments, “but the Bikura are such a small mystery. At the
most you’re going to find a few dozen indigenies living in a
region so cloudy and smoky and ... unimportant that even
the colony’s own mapsats haven’t noticed them. Why
choose them when there are big mysteries to study on
Hyperion ... like the labyrinths!” Hoyt had brightened. “Did

you know that Hyperion is one of the nine labyrinthine
worlds, Father?”

“Of course,” said Duré. A rough hemisphere of smoke
expanded from him until air currents broke it into tendrils
and tributaries. “But the labyrinths have their researchers
and admirers throughout the Web, Lenar, and the tunnels
have been there—on all nine worlds—for how long? Half a
million standard years? Closer to three quarters of a million,
| believe. Their secret will last. But how long will the Bikura
culture last before they’re absorbed into modern colonial
society or, more likely, are simply wiped out by
circumstances?”

Hoyt shrugged. “Perhaps they’re already gone. It’s been a
long time since Spedling’s encounter with them and there
haven't been any other confirmed reports. If they are extinct
as a group, then all of your time-debt and labor and pain of
getting there will be for nothing.”

“Precisely,” was all that Father Paul Duré had said and
puffed calmly on his pipe.

It was in their last hour together, during the dropship ride
down, that Father Hoyt had gained the slightest glimpse into
his companion’s thoughts. The limb of Hyperion had been
glowing white and green and lapis above them for hours
when suddenly the old dropship. had cut into the upper
layers of atmosphere, flame had briefly filled the window,
and then they were flying silently some sixty kilometers
above dark cloud masses and starlit seas with the hurtling
terminator of Hyperion’s sunrise rushing toward them like a
spectral tidal wave of light.

“Marvelous,” Paul Duré had whispered, more to himself
than to his young companion. “Marvelous. It is at times like
this that | have the sense ... the slightest sense ... of what a
sacrifice it must have been for the Son of God to condescend
to become the Son of Man.”

Hoyt had wanted to talk then, but Father Duré had
continued to stare out the window, lost in thought. Ten

minutes later they had landed at Keats Interstellar, Father
Duré was soon swept into the whirlpool of customs and
luggage rituals, and twenty minutes after that a thoroughly
disappointed Lenar Hoyt was rising toward space and the
Nadia Oleg once again.

r

“Five weeks later of my time, | returned to Pacem,” said
Father Hoyt. “I had mislaid eight years but for some reason
my sense of loss ran deeper than that simple fact.
Immediately upon my return, the bishop informed me that
there had been no word from Paul Duré during the four years
pf his stay on Hyperion. The New Vatican had spent a
fortune on fatline inquiries, but neither the colonial
authorities nor the consulate in Keats had been able to
locate the missing priest.”

Hoyt paused to sip from his water glass and the Consul
said, “I remember the search. | never met Duré, of course,
but we did our best to trace him. Theo, my aide, spent a lot
of energy over the years trying to solve the case of the
missing cleric. Other than a few contradictory reports of
sightings in Port Romance, there was no trace of him. And
those sightings went back to the weeks right after his
arrival, years before. There were hundreds of plantations out
there with no radios or comlines, primarily because they
were, harvesting bootleg drugs as well as fiberplastic. |
guess we never talked to the people at the right plantation.
At least | know Father Duré’s file was still open when | left.”

Father Hoyt nodded. “I landed in Keats a month after your
replacement had taken over at the consulate. The bishop
had been astonished when | volunteered to return. His
Holiness himself granted me an audience. | was on Hyperion
less than seven of its local months. By the time | left to
return to the Web, | had discovered the fate of Father Duré.”
Hoyt tapped the two stained leather books on the table. “If |

am to complete this,” he said, his voice thick, “I must read
excerpts from these.”

The treeship Yggdrasill had turned so the bulk of the tree
had blocked the sun. The effect was to plunge the dining
platform and the curved canopy of leaves beneath it into
night, but instead of a few thousand stars dotting the sky, as
would have been the case from a planets surface, literally a
million suns blazed above, beside, and beneath the group at
the table. Hyperion was a distinct sphere now, hurtling
directly at them like some deadly missile.

“Read,” said Martin Silenus.

FROM THE JOURNAL OF
FATHER PAUL DURE:

Day 1:

So begins my exile.

| am somewhat at a loss as to how to date my new journal.
By the monastic calendar on Pacem, it is the seventeenth
day of Thomasmonth in the Year of Our Lord 2732. By
Hegemony Standard, it is October 12, 589 PC. By Hyperion
reckoning, or so | am told by the wizened little clerk in the
old hotel where | am staying, it is the twenty-third day of
Lycius (the last of their seven forty-day months), either 426
A.D.C. (after dropship crash!) or the hundred and twenty-
eighth year of the reign of Sad King Billy, who has not
reigned for at least a hundred of those years.

To hell with it. l'II call it Day 1 of my exile.

Exhausting day. (Strange to be tired after months of sleep,
but that is said to be a common reaction after awakening
from fugue. My cells feel the fatigue of these past months of
travel even if | do not remember them. | don’t remember
feeling this tired from travel when I was younger.

| felt bad about not getting to know young Hoyt better. He
seems a decent sort, all proper catechism and bright eyes.
It’s no fault of youngsters like him that the Church is in its
final days. It’s just that his brand of happy naivete can do
nothing to arrest that slide into oblivion which the Church
seems destined for.

Well, my contributions have not helped either.

Brilliant view of my new world as the dropship brought us
down. | was able to make out two of the three continents—
Equus and Aquila. The third one, Ursa, was not visible.

Planetfall at Keats and hours of effort getting through
customs and taking ground transit into the city. Confused
images: the mountain range to the north with its shifting,
blue haze, foothills forested with orange and yellow trees,
pale sky with its green-blue under-coating, the sun too small
but more brilliant than Pacem’s. Colors seem more vivid from
a distance, dissolving and scattering as one approaches, like
a pointillist’s palette. The great sculpture of Sad King Billy
which | had heard so much about was oddly disappointing.
Seen from the highway, it looked raw and rough, a hasty
sketch chiseled from the dark mountain, rather than the
regal figure | had expected. It does brood over this
ramshackle city of half a million people in a way that the
neurotic poet-king probably would have appreciated.

The town itself seems to be separated into the sprawling
maze of slums and saloons which the locals call Jacktown
and Keats itself, the so-called Old City although it dates
back only four centuries, all polished stone and studied
sterility. | will take the tour soon.

| had scheduled a month in Keats but already | am eager
to press on. Oh, Monsignor Edouard, if you could see me
now. Punished but still unrepentant. More alone than ever
but strangely satisfied with my new exile. If my punishment
for past excesses brought about by my zeal is to be
banishment to the seventh circle of desolation, then
Hyperion was well chosen. | could forget my self-appointed

mission to the distant Bikura (are they real? | think not this
night) and content myself with living out the remainder of
my years in this provincial capital on this godforsaken
backwater world. My exile would be no less complete.

Ah, Edouard, boys together, classmates together
(although | was not so brilliant nor so orthodox as you), now
old men together. But now you are four years wiser and | am
still the mischievous, unrepentant boy you remember. | pray
that you are alive and well and praying for me.

Tired. Will sleep. Tomorrow, take the tour of Keats, eat well,
and arrange transport to Aquila and points south.

Day 5:

There is a cathedral in Keats. Or, rather, there was one. It
has been abandoned for at least two standard centuries. It
lies in ruins with its transept open to the green-blue skies,
one of its western towers unfinished, and the other tower a
Skeletal framework of tumbled stone and rusted
reinforcement rods.

| stumbled upon it while wandering, lost, along the banks
of the Hoolie River in the sparsely populated section of town
where the Old City decays into Jacktown amid a jumble of
tail warehouses which prevent even a glimpse of the ruined
towers of the cathedral until one turns a corner onto a
narrow cul-de-sac and there is the shell of the cathedral; its
chapter house has half fallen away into the river, its facade
is pocked with remnants of the mournful, apocalyptic
statuary of the post-Hegira expansionist period.

| wandered through the latticework of shadows and fallen
blocks into the nave. The bishopric on Pacem had not
mentioned any history of Catholicism on Hyperion, much
less the presence of a cathedral. It is almost inconceivable
that the scattered seedship colony of four centuries ago
could have supported a large enough congregation to

warrant the presence of a bishop, much less a cathedral. Yet
there it was.

| poked through the shadows of the sacristy. Dust and
powdered plaster hung in the air like incense, outlining two
shafts of sunlight streaming down from narrow windows high
above. | stepped out into a broader patch of sunlight and
approached an altar stripped of all decoration except for
chips and cracks caused by falling masonry. The great cross
which had hung on the east wall behind the altar had also
fallen and now lay in ceramic splinters among the heap of
stones there. Without conscious thought | stepped behind
the altar, raised my arms, and began the celebration of the
Eucharist. There was no sense of parody or melodrama in
this act, no symbolism or hidden intention; it was merely the
automatic reaction of a priest who had said Mass almost
daily for more than forty-six years of his life and who now
faced the prospect of never again participating in the
reassuring ritual of that celebration.

It was with some shock that | realized | had a
congregation. The old woman was kneeling in the fourth row
of pews. The black of her dress and scarf blended so
perfectly with the shadows there that only the pale oval of
her face was visible, lined and ancient, floating disembodied
in the darkness. Startled, | stopped speaking the litany of
consecration. She was looking at me but something about
her eyes, even at a distance, instantly convinced me that
she was blind. For a moment | could not speak and stood
there mute, squinting in the dusty light bathing the altar,
trying to explain this spectral image to myself while at the
same time attempting to frame an explanation of my own
presence and actions.

When | did find my voice and called to her—the words
echoing in the great hall—l realized that she had moved. |
could hear her feet scraping on the stone floor. There was a
rasping sound and then a brief flare of light illuminated her
profile far to the right of the altar. | shielded my eyes from

the shafts of sunlight and began picking my way over the
detritus where the altar railing had once stood. | called to
her again, offered reassurances, and told her not to be
afraid, even though it was | who had chills coursing up my
back. | moved quickly but when | reached the sheltered
corner of the nave she was gone. A small door led to the
crumbling chapter house and the riverbank. There was no
sight of her. | returned to the dark interior and would have
gladly attributed her appearance to my imagination, a
waking dream after so many months of enforced cryogenic
dreamlessness, but for a single, tangible proof of her
presence. There in the cool darkness burned a lone red
votive candle, its tiny flame flickering to unseen drafts and
currents.

| am tired of this city. | am tired of its pagan pretensions
and false histories. Hyperion is a poet’s world devoid of
poetry. Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism
and mindless, boomtown energy. There are three Zen
Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim mosques in the
town, but the real houses of worship are the countless
Saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling the
fiberplastic shipments from the south, and the Shrike Cult
temples where lost souls hide their suicidal hopelessness
behind a shield of shallow mysticism. The whole planet reeks
of mysticism without revelation.

To hell with it.

Tomorrow | head south. There are skimmers and other
aircraft on this absurd world but, for the Common Folk,
travel between these accursed island continents seems
restricted to boat—which takes forever, | am told—or one of
the huge passenger dirigibles which departs from Keats only
once a week.

| leave early tomorrow by dirigible.

Day 10:

Animals.

The firstdown team for this planet must have had a
fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we
were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an
irregular coastline called the Mane. We’ve spent the last day
making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a
large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading
passengers and freight at Felix, the “major city” of the
island. From what | can see from the observation promenade
and the mooring tower, there can’t be more than five
thousand people living in that random collection of hovels
and barracks.

Next the ship will make its eight-hundred-kilometer crawl
down a series of smaller islands called the Nine Tails and
then take a bold leap across seven hundred kilometers of
open sea and the equator. The next land we see then is the
northwest coast of Aquila, the so-called Beak.

Animals.

To call this conveyance a “passenger dirigible” is an
exercise in creative semantics. It is a huge lifting device with
cargo holds large enough to carry the town of Felix out to
sea and still have room for thousands of bales of fiberplastic.
Meanwhile, the less important cargo—we passengers—make
do where we can. | have set up a cot near the aft loading
portal and made a rather comfortable niche for myself with
my personal luggage and three large trunks of expedition
gear. Near me is a family of eight—indigenie plantation
workers returning from a biannual shopping expedition of
their own to Keats—and although | do not mind the sound or
scent of their caged pigs or the squeal of their food
hamsters, the incessant, confused crowing of their poor
befuddled rooster is more than | can stand some nights.

Animals!

Day 11:

Dinner tonight in the salon above the promenade deck
with Citizen Heremis Denzel, a retired professor from a small
planters’ college near Endymion. He informed me that the
Hyperion first-down team had no animal fetish after all; the
official names of the three continents are not Equus, Ursa,
and Aquila, but Creighton, Allensen, and Lopez. He went on
to say that this was in honor of three middle-level
bureaucrats in the old Survey Service. Better the animal
fetish!

It is after dinner. | am alone on the outside promenade to
watch the sunset. The walkway here is sheltered by the
forward cargo modules so the wind is little more than a salt-
tinged breeze. Above me curves the orange and green skin
of the dirigible. We are between islands; the sea is a rich
lapis shot through with verdant undertones, a reversal of sky
tones. A scattering of high cirrus catches the last light of
Hyperion’s too small sun and ignites like burning coral.
There is no sound except for the faintest hum of the electric
turbines. Three hundred meters below, the shadow of a
huge, mantalike undersea creature keeps pace with the
dirigible. A second ago an insect or bird the size and color of
a hummingbird but with gossamer wings a meter across
paused five meters out to inspect me before diving toward
the sea with folded wings.

Edouard, | feel very alone tonight. It would help if | knew
you were alive, still working in the garden, writing evenings
in your study. | thought my travels would stir my old beliefs
in St. Teilhard’s concept of the God in Whom the Christ of
Evolution, the Personal, and the Universal, the En Haut and
the En Avant are joined, but no such renewal is forthcoming.

It is growing dark. | am growing old. | feel something ... not
yet remorse ... at my sin of falsifying the evidence on the
Armaghast dig. But, Edouard, Your Excellency, if the artifacts
had indicated the presence of a Christ-oriented culture
there, six hundred light-years from Old Earth, almost three

thousand years before man left the surface of the
homeworld ...

Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a
way which could have meant the resurgence of Christianity
in our lifetime?

Yes, it was. But not, | think, because of the sin of
tampering with the data, but the deeper sin of thinking that
Christianity could be saved. The Church is dying, Edouard.
And not merely our beloved branch of the Holy Tree, but all
of its offshoots, vestiges, and cankers. The entire Body of
Christ is dying as surely as this poorly used body of mine,
Edouard. You and | knew this in Armaghast, where the blood-
sun illuminated only dust and death. We knew it that cool,
green summer at the College when we took our first vows.
We knew it as boys in the quiet playfields of Villefiranche-
sur-Saone. We know it now.

The light is gone now; | must write by the slight glow from
the salon windows a deck above. The stars lie in strange
constellations. The Middle Sea glows at night with a
greenish, unhealthy phosphorescence. There is a dark mass
on the horizon to the southeast. It may be a storm or it may
be the next island in the chain, the third of the nine “tails.”
(What mythology deals with a cat with nine tails? | know of
none.)

For the sake of the bird | saw earlier—if it was a bird—l
pray that it is an island ahead and not a storm.

Day 28:

| have been in Port Romance eight days and | have seen
three dead men.

The first was a beached corpse, a bloated, white parody of
a man, that had washed up on the mud flats beyond the
mooring tower my first evening in town. Children threw
stones at it.

The second man | watched being pulled from the burned
wreckage of a methane-unit shop in the poor section of town
near my hotel. His body was charred beyond recognition and
shrunken by the heat, his arms and legs pulled tight in the
prizefighter posture burning victims have been reduced to
since time immemorial. | had been fasting all day and |
confess with shame that | began to salivate when the air
filled with the rich, frying-fat odor of burned flesh.

The third man was murdered not three meters from me. |
had just emerged from the hotel onto the maze of mud-
splattered planks that serve as sidewalks in this miserable
town when shots rang out and a man several paces ahead of
me lurched as if his foot had slipped, soun toward me with a
quizzical look on his face, and fell sideways into the mud
and sewage.

He had been shot three times with some sort of projectile
weapon. Two of the bullets had struck his chest, the third
entered just below the left eye. Incredibly, he was still
breathing when | reached him. Without thinking about it, |
removed my stole from my carrying bag, fumbled for the vial
of holy water | had carried for so long, and proceeded to
perform the sacrament of Extreme Unction. No one in the
gathering crowd objected. The fallen man stirred once,
cleared his throat as if he were about to speak, and died. The
crowd dispersed even before the body was removed.

The man was middle-aged, sandy-haired, and slightly
overweight. He carried no identification, not even a
universal card or comlog. There were six silver coins in his
pocket.

For some reason, | elected to stay with the body the rest of
that day. The doctor was a short and cynical man who
allowed me to stay during the required autopsy. | suspect
that he was starved for conversation.

“This is what the whole thing’s worth,” he said as he
opened the poor man’s belly like a pink satchel, pulling the

folds of skin and muscle back and pinning them down like
tent flaps.

“What thing?” | asked.

“His life,” said the doctor and pulled the skin of the
corpses face up and back like a greasy mask. “Your life. My
life.” The red and white stripes of overlapping muscle turned
to blue bruise around the ragged hole just above the
cheekbone.

“There has to be more than this,” | said.

The doctor looked up from his grim work with a bemused
smile. “Is there?” he said. “Please show me.” He lifted the
man’s heart and seemed to weigh it in one hand. “In the
Web worlds, this’d be worth some money on the open
market. There’re those too poor to keep vat-grown, cloned
parts on store, but too well off to die just for want of a heart.
But out here it’s just offal.”

“There has to be more,” | said, although | felt little
conviction. | remembered the funeral of His Holiness Pope
Urban XV shortly before | left Pacem. As has been the
custom since pre-Hegira days, the corpse was not
embalmed. It waited in the anteroom off the main basilica to
be fitted for the plain wooden coffin. As | helped Edouard
and Monsignor Frey place the vestments on the stiffened
corpse | noticed the browning skin and slackening mouth.

The doctor shrugged and finished the perfunctory autopsy.
There was the briefest of formal inquiries. No suspect was
found, no motive put forward. A description of the murdered
man was sent to Keats but the man himself was buried the
next day in a pauper’s field between the mud flats and the
yellow jungle.

Port Romance is a jumble of yellow, weirwood structures
set on a maze of scaffolds and planks stretching far out onto
the tidal mud flats at the mouth of the Kans. The river is
almost two kilometers wide here where it spills out into
Toschahai Bay, but only a few channels are navigable and
the dredging goes on day and night. | lie awake each night

in my cheap room with the window open to the pounding of
the dredge-hammer sounding like the booming of this vile
city’s heart, the distant susurration of the surf its wet
breathing. Tonight | listen to the city breathe and cannot
help but give it the flayed face of the murdered man.

The companies keep a skimmerport on the edge of town to
ferry men and materiel inland to the larger plantations, but |
do not have enough money to bribe my way aboard. Rather,
| could get myse/f aboard but cannot afford to transport my
three trunks of medical and scientific gear. | am still
tempted. My service among the Bikura seems more absurd
and irrational now than ever before. Only my strange need
for a destination and a certain masochistic determination to
complete the terms of my self-imposed exile keep me
moving upriver.

There is a riverboat departing up the Kans in two days. |
have booked passage and will move my trunks onto it
tomorrow. It will not be hard to leave Port Romance behind.

Day 41:

The Emporotic Girandole continues its slow progress
upriver. No sight of human habitation since we left Melton’s
Landing two days ago. The jungle presses down to the
riverbank like a solid wall now; more, it almost completely
overhangs us in places where the river narrows to thirty or
forty meters. The light itself is yellow, rich as liquid butter,
filtered as it is through foliage and fronds eighty meters
above the brown surface of the Kans. | sit on the rusted tin
roof of the center passenger barge and strain to make out
my first glimpse of a tesla tree. Old Kady sitting nearby
pauses in his whittling, spits over the side through a gap in
his teeth, and laughs at me. “Ain’t going to be no flame trees
this far down,” he says. “If they was the forest sure as hell
wouldn't look like this. You got to get up in the Pinions

before you see a tesla. We ain’t out of the rain forest yet,
Padre.”

It rains every afternoon. Actually, rain is too gentle a term
for the deluge that strikes us each day, obscuring the shore,
pounding the tin roofs of the barges with a deafening roar,
and slowing our upstream crawl until it seems we are
standing still. It is as if the river becomes a vertical torrent
each afternoon, a waterfall which the ship must climb if we
are to go on.

The Girandole is an ancient, flat-bottomed tow with five
barges lashed around it like ragged children clinging to their
tired mother’s skirts. Three of the two-level barges carry
bales of goods to be traded or sold at the few plantations
and settlements along the river. The other two offer a
simulacrum of lodging for the indigenies traveling upriver,
although | suspect that some of the barge’s residents are
permanent. My own berth boasts a stained mattress on the
floor and lizardlike insects on the walls.

After the rains everyone gathers on the decks to watch the
evening mists rise from the cooling river. The air is very hot
and supersaturated with moisture most of the day now. Old
Kady tells me that | have come too late to make the climb
through the rain and flame forests before the tesla trees
become active. We shall see.

Tonight the mists rise like the spirits of all the dead who
sleep beneath the river’s dark surface. The last tattered
remnants of the afternoon’s cloud cover, dissipate through
the treetops and color returns to the world. | watch as the
dense forest shifts from chrome yellow to a translucent
saffron and then slowly fades through ocher to umber to
gloom. Aboard the Girandole, Old Kady lights the lanterns
and candleglobes hanging from the sagging second tier and,
as if not to be outdone, the darkened jungle begins to glow
with the faint phosphorescence of decay while glowbirds
and multinued gossamers can be seen floating from branch
to branch in the darker upper regions.

Hyperion’s small moon is not visible tonight but this world
moves through more debris than is common for a planet so
close to its sun and the night skies are illuminated by
frequent meteor showers. Tonight the heavens are especially
fertile and when we move onto wide sections of the river we
can see a tracery of brilliant meteor trails weaving the stars
together. Their images burn the retina after a while and |
look down at the river only to see the same optic echo there
in the dark waters.

There is a bright glow on the eastern horizon and Old Kady
tells me that this is from the orbital mirrors which give light
to a few of the larger plantations.

It is too warm to return to my cabin. | spread my thin mat
on the rooftop of my barge and watch the celestial light
show while clusters of indigenie families sing haunting
songs in an argot | have not even tried to learn. | wonder
about the Bikura, still far away from here, and a strange
anxiety rises in me.

Somewhere in the forest an animal screams with the voice
of a frightened woman.

Day 60:
Arrived Perecebo Plantation. Sick.

Day 62:

Very ill. Fever, fits of shaking. All yesterday | was vomiting
black bile. The rain is deafening. At night the clouds are lit
from above by orbital mirrors. The sky seems to be on fire.
My fever is very high.

A woman takes care of me. Bathes me. Too sick to be
ashamed. Her hair is darker than most indigenies’. She says
little. Dark, gentle eyes.

Oh, God, to be sick so far from home.

Day

sheis waiting spying comesin from the rain the thin shirt
on purpose to tempt me, Knows what iam my skin burning
on fire thin cotton nipples dark against it i knowwho they are
they are watching, here hear their voices at night they bathe
me in poison burns me they think | dont know but i hear
their voices above the rain when the screaming stops stop
stop

My skin is almost gone, red underneath can feel the hole
in my cheek, when | find the bullet iwill spit it out it out,
agnusdeiquitolispecattamundi miserer nobis misere nobis
miserere

Day 65;
Thank you, dear Lord, for deliverance from illness.

Day 66:

Shaved today. Was able to make it to the shower.

Semfa helped me prepare for the administrator’s visit. |
expected him to be one of the large, gruff types I’ve seen
out the window, working in the sorting compound, but he
was a quiet black man with a slight liso. He was most
helpful. | had been concerned about paying for my medical
care but he reassured me that there would be no charge.
Even better—he will assign a man to lead me into the high
country! He says it is late in the season but if | can travel in
ten days we should be able to make it through the flame
forest to the Cleft before the tesla trees are fully active.

After he left | sat and talked to Semfa a bit. Her husband
died here three local months ago in a harvesting accident.
Semfa herself had come from Port Romance; her marriage to
Mikel had been a salvation for her and she has chosen to

stay on here doing odd jobs rather than go back downriver. |
do not blame her.

After a massage, | will sleep. Many dreams about my
mother recently.

Ten days. | will be ready in ten days.

Day 75:

Before leaving with Tuk, | went down to the matrix paddies
to say goodbye to Semfa. She said little but | could see in
her eyes that she was sad to see me go. Without
premeditation, | blessed her and then kissed her on the
forehead. Tuk stood nearby, smiling and bobbing. Then we
were off, leading the two packbrids. Supervisor Orlandi came
to the end of the road and waved as we entered the narrow
lane hacked into the aureate foliage.

Domine, dirige nos.

Day 82:

After a week on the trail—what trail?—after a week in the
trackless, yellow rain forest, after a week of exhausting
climb up the ever steeper shoulder of the Pinion Plateau, we
emerged this morning onto a rocky outcropping that allowed
us a view back across an expanse of jungle toward the Beak
and the Middle Sea. The plateau here is almost three
thousand meters above sea level and the view was
impressive. Heavy rain clouds spread out below us to the
foot of the Pinion Hills, but through gaps in the white and
gray carpet of cloud we caught glimpses of the Kans in its
leisurely uncoiling toward Port R. and the sea, chrome-yellow
swatches of the forest we had struggled through, and a hint
of magenta far to the east that Tuk swore was the lower
matrix of fiberplastic fields near Perecebo.

We continued onward and upward late into the evening.
Tuk is obviously worried that we will be caught in the flame

forests when the tesla trees become active. | struggle to
keep up, tugging at the heavily laden ‘brid and saying silent
prayers to keep my mind off my aches, pains, and general
misgivings.

Day 83:

Loaded and moving before dawn today. The air smells of
smoke and ashes.

The change in vegetation here on the Plateau is startling.
No longer evident are the ubiquitous weirwood and leafy
chalma. After passing through an intermediate zone of short
evergreens and everblues, then after climbing again through
dense strands of mutated lodgepole pines and triaspen, we
came into the flame forest proper with its groves of tall
prometheus, trailers of ever present phoenix, and round
stands of amber lambents. Occasionally we encountered
impenetrable breaks of the white-fibrous, bifurcated bestos
plants that Tuk picturesquely referred to as “... looking like
de rotting cocks o’ some dead giants what be buried shallow
here, dat be sure.” My guide has a way with words.

It was late afternoon before we saw our first tesla tree. For
half an hour we had been trudging over an ash-covered
forest floor, trying not to tread on the tender shoots of
phoenix and firewhip gamely pushing up through the sooty
soil, when suddenly Tuk stopped and pointed.

The tesla tree, still half a kilometer away, stood at least a
hundred meters tall, half again as high as the tallest
prometheus. Near its crown it bulged with the distinctive
onion-shaped dome of its accumulator gall. The radial
branches above the gall trailed dozens of nimbus vines,
each looking silver and metallic against the clear green and
lapis sky. The whole thing made me think of some elegant
High Muslim mosque on New Mecca irreverently garlanded
with tinsel.

“We got to get de ‘brids and our asses de hell out o’ here,”
grunted Tuk. He insisted that we change into flame forest
gear right then and there. We spent the rest of the afternoon
and evening trudging on in our osmosis masks and thick,
rubber-soled boots, sweating under layers of leathery
gamma-cloth. Both of the ‘brids acted nervous, their long
ears pricking at the slightest sound. Even through my mask |
could smell the ozone; it reminded me of electric trains | had
played with as a child on lazy Christmas Day afternoons in
Villefranche-sur-Sa6ne.

We are camping as close as we can to a bestos break this
night. Tuk showed me how to set out the ring of arrestor
rods, all the time clucking dire warnings to himself and
searching the evening sky for clouds.

| plan to sleep well in spite of everything.

Day 84:

0400 hours—

Sweet Mother of Christ.

For three hours we have been caught up in the middle of
the end of the world.

The explosions started shortly after midnight, mere
lightning crashes at first, and against our better judgment
Tuk and | slid our heads through the tent flap to watch the
pyrotechnics. | am used to the Matthewmonth monsoon
storms on Pacem, so the first hour of lightning displays did
not seem too unusual. Only the sight of distant tesla trees as
the unerring focus of the aerial discharge was a bit
unnerving. But soon the forest behemoths were glowing and
spitting with their own accumulated energy and then—just
as | was drifting off to sleep despite the continued noise—
true Armageddon was unleashed.

At least a hundred arcs of electricity must have been
released in the first ten seconds of the tesla trees’ opening
spasms of violent energy. A prometheus less than thirty

meters from us exploded, dropping flaming brands fifty
meters to the forest floor. The arrestor rods glowed, hissed,
and deflected arc after arc of blue-white death over and
around our small campsite. Tuk screamed something but no
mere human sound was audible over the onslaught of light
and noise. A patch of trailing phoenix burst into flame near
the tethered ‘brids and one of the terrified animals—hobbled
and blindfolded as it was—broke free and lunged through
the circle of glowing arrestor rods. Instantly half a dozen
bolts of lightning from the nearest tesla arced to the hapless
animal. For a mad second | could have sworn | saw the
beast’s skeleton glowing through boiling flesh and then it
spasmed high into the air and simply ceased to be.

For three hours we have watched the end of the world. Two
of the arrestor rods have fallen but the other eight continue
to function. Tuk and | huddle in the hot cave of our tent,
osmosis masks filtering enough cool oxygen out of the
superheated, smoky air to allow us to breathe. Only the lack
of undergrowth and Tuk’s skill in placing our tent away from
other targets and near the sheltering bestos plants have
allowed us to survive. That and the eight whiskered-alloy
rods that stand between us and eternity.

“They seem to be holding up well!” | shout to Tuk over the
hiss and crackle, crash and split of the storm.

“Dey be made to stand de hour, mebbe two,” grunts my
guide. “Any time, mebbe sooner, dey fuse, we die.”

| nod and sip at lukewarm water through the slipstrip of
my osmosis mask. If | Survive this night, | shall always thank
God for His generosity in allowing me to see this sight.

Day 87:

Tuk and | emerged from the smoldering northeastern edge
of the flame forest at noon yesterday, promptly set up camp
by the edge of a small stream, and slept for eighteen hours
straight; making up for three nights of no sleep and two

grueling days moving without rest through a nightmare of
flame and ash. Everywhere we looked as we approached the
hogback ridge that marked the terminus of the forest, we
could see seedpods and cones burst open with new life for
the various fire species that had died in the conflagration of
the previous two nights. Five of our arrestor rods still
functioned, although neither Tuk nor | was eager to test
them another night. Our surviving packbrid collapsed and
died the instant the heavy load was lifted off its back.

| awoke this morning at dawn to the sound of running
water. | followed the small stream a kilometer to the
northeast, following a deepening in its sound, until suddenly
it dropped from sight.

The Cleft! | had almost forgotten our destination. This
morning, stumbling through the fog, leaping from one wet
rock to another alongside the widening stream, | took a leap
to a final boulder, teetered there, regained my balance, and
looked straight down above a waterfall that dropped almost
three thousand meters to mist, rock, and river far below.

The Cleft was not carved out of the rising plateau as was
the legendary Grand Canyon on Old Earth or World Crack on
Hebron. In spite of its active oceans and seemingly earthlike
continents, Hyperion is tectonically quite dead; more like
Mars, Lusus, or Armaghast in its total lack of continental
drift. And like Mars and Lusus, Hyperion is afflicted with its
Deep Ice Ages, although here the periodicity is spread to
thirty-seven million years by the long ellipse of the currently
absent binary dwarf. The comlog compares the Cleft to the
pre-terraformed Mariner Valley on Mars, both being caused
by the weakening of crust through periodic freeze and thaw
over the aeons, followed by the flow of subterranean rivers
such as the Kans. Then the massive collapse, running like a
long scar through the mountainous wing of the continent
Aquila.

Tuk joined me as | stood on the edge of the Cleft. | was
naked, rinsing the ash smell from my traveling clothes and

cassock. | splashed cold water over my pale flesh and
laughed out loud as the echoes of Tuk’s shouts came back
from the North Wall two thirds of a kilometer away. Because
of the nature of the crust collapse, Tuk and | stood far out on
an overhang that hid the South Wall below us. Although
perilously exposed, we assumed that the rocky cornice
which had defied gravity for millions of years would last a
few more hours as we bathed, relaxed, shouted echoing
hallos until we were hoarse, and generally acted like
children liberated from school. Tuk confessed that he had
never penetrated the full width of the flame forest—nor
known anyone who had in this season—and announced that,
now that the tesla trees were becoming fully active, he
would have at least a three-month wait until he could return.
He did not seem too sorry and | was glad to have him with
me.

In the afternoon we transported my gear in relays, setting
up camp near the stream a hundred meters back from the
cornice and stacking my flowfoam boxes of scientific gear for
further sorting in the morning.

It was cold this evening. After dinner, just before sunset, |
pulled on my thermal jacket and walked alone to a rocky
ledge southwest of where | had first encountered the Cleft.
From my vantage point far out over the river, the view was
memorable. Mists rose from unseen waterfalls tumbling to
the river far below, spray rising in shifting curtains of mist to
multiply the setting sun into a dozen violet spheres and
twice that many rainbows. | watched as each spectrum was
bom, rose toward the darkening dome of sky, and died. As
the cooling air settled into the cracks and caverns of the
plateau and the warm air rushed skyward, pulling leaves,
twigs, and mist upward in a vertical gale, a sound ebbed up
out of the Cleft as if the continent itself was calling with the
voices of stone giants, gigantic bamboo flutes, church
organs the size of palaces, the clear, perfect notes ranging
from the shrillest soprano to the deepest bass. | speculated

on wind vectors against the fluted rock walls, on caverns far
below venting deep cracks in the motionless crust, and on
the illusion of human voices that random harmonics can
generate. But in the end | set aside speculation and simply
listened as the Cleft sang its farewell hymn to the sun.

| walked back to our tent and its circle of bioluminescent
lantern light as the first fusillade of meteor showers burned
the skies overhead and distant explosions from the flame
forests rippled along the southern and western horizons like
cannon fire from some ancient war on pre-Hegira Old Earth.

Once in the tent | tried the long-range comlog bands but
there is nothing but static. | suspect that even if the
primitive comsats that serve the fiberplastic plantations
were ever to broadcast this far east, anything but the
tightest laser or fatline beams would be masked by the
mountains and tesla activity. On Pacem, few of us at the
monastery wore or carried personal comlogs, but the
datasphere was always there if we needed to tap into it.
Here there is no choice.

| sit and listen to the last notes from the canyon wind die,
watch the skies simultaneously darken and blaze, smile at
the sound of Tuk’s snoring from his bedroll outside the tent,
and | think to myself, /f this is exile, so be it.

Day 88:

Tuk is dead. Murdered.

| found his body when | left the tent at sunrise. He had
been sleeping outside, not more than four meters from me.
He had said that he wished to sleep under the stars.

The murderers cut his throat while he slept. | heard no cry.
| did dream, however: dreams of Semfa ministering to me
during my fever. Dreams of cool hands touching my neck
and chest, touching the crucifix | have worn since childhood.
| stood over Tuk’s body, staring at the wide, dark circle
where his blood had soaked into Hyperion’s uncaring soil,

and | shivered at the thought that the dream had been more
than a dream—that hands had touched me in the night.

| confess that | reacted more like a frightened old fool than
as a priest. | did administer Extreme Unction, but then the
panic struck me and | left my poor guide’s body, desperately
searched through the supplies for a weapon, and took away
the machete | had used in the rain forest and the low-
voltage maser with which | had planned to hunt small game.
Whether | would have used a weapon on a human being,
even to save my own life, | do not know. But, in my panic, |
carried the machete, the maser, and the powered binoculars
to a high boulder near the Cleft and searched the region for
any signs of the murderers. Nothing stirred except the tiny
arboreals and gossamers we had seen flitting through the
trees yesterday. The forest itself seemed abnormally thick
and dark. The Cleft offered a hundred terraces, ledges, and
rock balconies to the northeast for entire bands of savages.
An army could have hidden there in the crags and ever
present mists.

After thirty minutes of fruitless vigilance and foolish
cowardice, | returned to the campsite and prepared Tuk’s
body for burial. It took me well over two hours to dig a
proper grave in the rocky soil of the plateau. When it was
filled and the formal service was finished, | could think of
nothing personal to say about the rough, funny little man
who had been my guide. “Watch over him, Lord,” | said at
last, disgusted at my own hypocrisy, sure in my heart that |
was mouthing words only to myself. “Give him safe passage.
Amen.”

This evening | have moved my camp half a kilometer
north. My tent is pitched in an open area ten meters away
but | am wedged with my back against the boulder, sleeping
robes pulled around, the machete and maser nearby. After
Tuk’s funeral | went through the supplies and boxes of
equipment. Nothing had been taken except for the few
remaining arrestor rods. Immediately | wondered if someone

had followed us through the flame forest in order to kill Tuk
and strand me here, but | could think of no motive for such
an elaborate action. Anyone from the plantations could have
killed us as we slept in the rain forest or—better yet from a
murderer’s point of view—deep in the flame forest where no
one would wonder at two charred corpses. That left the
Bikura. My primitive charges.

| considered returning through the flame forest without
the rods but soon abandoned the idea. It is probable death
to stay and certain death to go.

Three months before the teslas become dormant. One
hundred twenty of the twenty-six-hour local days. An
eternity.

Dear Christ, why has this come to me? And why was |
spared last night if | am merely to be offered up this
night ... or next?

| sit here in the darkening crag and | listen to the suddenly
ominous moaning rising with the night wind from the Cleft
and | pray as the sky lights with the blood-red streaks of
meteor trails.

Mouthing words to myself.

Day 95:

The terrors of the past week have largely abated. | find
that even fear fades and becomes commonplace after days
of anticlimax.

| used the machete to cut small trees for a lean-to,
covering the roof and side with gamma-cloth and caulking
between the logs with mud. The back wall is the solid stone
of the boulder. | have sorted through my research gear and
set some of it out, although | suspect that | will never use it
now.

| have begun foraging to supplement my quickly
diminishing cache of freeze-dried food. By now, according to
the absurd schedule drawn up so long ago on Pacem, | was

to have been living with the Bikura for some weeks and
trading small goods for local food. No matter. Besides my
diet of bland but easily boiled chalma roots, | have found
half a dozen varieties of berries and larger fruits that the
comlog assures me are edible; so far only one has disagreed
with me enough to keep me squatting all night near the
edge of the nearest ravine.

| pace the confines of the region as restlessly as one of
those caged pelops that were so prized by the minor
padishahs on Armaghast. A kilometer to the south and four
to the west, the flame forests are in full form. In the morning,
smoke vies with the shifting curtains of mist to hide the sky.
Only the near-solid breaks of bestos, the rocky soil here on
the summit plateau, and the hogback ridges running like
armor-plated vertebrae northeast from here keep the teslas
at bay.

To the north, the plateau widens out and the undergrowth
becomes denser near the Cleft for some fifteen kilometers
until the way is blocked by a ravine a third as deep and half
as wide as the Cleft itself. Yesterday | reached this
northernmost point and stared across the gaping barrier
with some frustration. | will try again someday, detouring to
the east to find a crossing point, but from the telltale signs
of phoenix across the chasm and the pall of smoke along the
northeastern horizon, | suspect | will find only the chalma-
filled canyons and steppes of flame forest that are roughed
in on the orbital survey map | carry.

Tonight | visited Tuk’s rocky grave as the evening wind
began to wail its aeolian dirge. | knelt there and tried to pray
but nothing came.

Edouard, nothing came. | am as empty as those fake
sarcophagi that you and | unearthed by the score from the
sterile desert sands near Tarum bel Wadi.

The Zen Gnostics would say that this emptiness is a good
sign; that it presages openness to a new level of awareness,
new insights, new experiences.

Merde.
My emptiness is only ... emptiness.

Day 96:

| have found the Bikura. Or, rather, they have found me. |
will write what | can before they come to rouse me from my
“sleep.”

Today | was doing some detail mapping a mere four
kilometers north of camp when the mists lifted in the
midday warmth and | noticed a series of terraces on my side
of the Cleft that had been hidden until then. | was using my
powered glasses to inspect the terraces—actually a series of
laddered ledges, spires, shelves, and tussocks extending far
out onto the overhang—when | realized that | was staring at
man-made habitations. The dozen or so huts were crude—
rough hovels of heaped chalma fronds, stones, and
spongeturf—but they were unmistakably of human origin.

| was standing there irresolute, binoculars still lifted, trying
to decide whether to climb down to the exposed ledges and
confront the inhabitants or to retreat to my camp, when | felt
that lifting chill along the back and neck that tells one with
absolute certainty that he is no longer alone. | lowered the
binoculars and turned slowly. The Bikura were there, at least
thirty of them, standing in a semicircle that left me no
retreat to the forest.

| do not know what | expected; naked savages, perhaps,
with fierce expressions and necklaces of teeth. Perhaps | had
half expected to find the kind of bearded, wild-haired
hermits that travelers sometimes encountered in the Moshé
Mountains on Hebron. Whatever | had held in mind, the
reality of the Bikura did not fit the template.

The people who had approached me so silently were short
—none came higher than my shoulder—and swathed in
roughly woven dark robes that covered them from neck to
toe. When they moved, as some did now, they seemed to

glide over the rough ground like wraiths. From a distance,
their appearance reminded me of nothing so much as a
gaggle of diminutive Jesuits at a New Vatican enclave.

| almost giggled then, but realized that such a response
might well be a sign of rising panic. The Bikura showed no
outward signs of aggression to cause such a panic; they
carried no weapons, their small hands were empty. As empty
as their expressions.

Their physiognomy is hard to describe succinctly. They are
bald. All of them. That baldness, the absence of any facial
hair, and the loose robes that fell in a straight line to the
ground, all conspired to make it very difficult to tell the men
from the women. The group now confronting me—more than
fifty by this time—looked to be all of roughly the same age:
somewhere between forty and fifty standard years. Their
faces were smooth, the skin tinged with a yellowish cast that
| guessed might be associated with generations of ingesting
trace minerals in the astery chalma and other local plant
life.

One might be tempted to describe the round faces of the
Bikura as cherubic until, upon closer inspection, that
impression of sweetness fades and is replaced by another
interpretation—placid idiocy. As a priest, | have spent
enough time on backward worlds to see the effects of an
ancient genetic disorder variously called Down’s syndrome,
mongolism, or generation-ship legacy. This, then, was the
overall impression created by the sixty or so dark-robed little
people who had approached me—I was being greeted by a
silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.

| reminded myself that these were almost certainly the
Same group of “smiling children” who had slit Tuk’s throat
while he slept and left him to die like a butchered pig.

The closest Bikura stepped forward, stopped five paces
from me, and said something in a soft monotone.

“Just a minute,” | said and fumbled out my comlog. |
tapped in the translator function.

“Beyetet ota menna lot cresfem ket?” asked the short man
in front of me.

| slipped on the hearplug just in time to hear the comlogs
translation. There was no lag time. The apparently foreign
language was a simple corruption of archaic seedship
English not so far removed from the indigene argot of the
plantations. “You are the man who belongs to the cross
Shape/cruciform,” interpreted the comlog, giving me two
choices for the final noun.

“Yes,” | said, Knowing now that these were the ones who
had touched me the night | slept through Tuk’s murder.
Which meant that these were the ones who had murdered
Tuk.

| waited. The hunting maser was in my pack. The pack was
set against a small ehalma not ten paces from me. Half a
dozen Bikura stood between me and it. It did not matter. |
knew at that instant that | would not use a weapon against
another human being, even a human being who had
murdered my guide and might well be planning to murder
me at any second. | closed my eyes and said a silent Act of
Contrition. When | opened my eyes, more of the Bikura had
arrived. There was a cessation of movement, as if a quorum
had been filled, a decision reached.

“Yes,” | said again into the silence, “I am the one who
wears the cross.” | heard the comlog speaker pronounce the
last word “cresfem.”

The Bikura nodded in unison and—as if from long practice
as altar boys—all went to one knee, robes rustling softly, in a
perfect genuflection.

| opened my mouth to speak and found that I had nothing
to say. | closed my mouth.

The Bikura stood. A breeze moved the brittle chalma
fronds arid leaves together to make a dry, end-of-summer
sound above us. The Bikura nearest to me on the left
stepped closer, grasped my forearm with a touch of cool,
strong fingers, and spoke a soft sentence that my comlog

translated as, “Come. It is time to go to the houses and
sleep.”

It was midafternoon. Wondering if the comlog had
translated the word “sleep” properly or if it might be an
idiom or metaphor for “die,” | nodded and followed them
toward the village at the edge of the Cleft.

Now | sit in the hut and wait. There are rustling sounds.
Someone else is awake now. | sit and wait.

Day 97:

The Bikura call themselves the “Three Score and Ten.”

| have spent the past twenty-six hours talking to them,
observing, making notes when they take their two-hour,
midafternoon “sleep,” and generally trying to record as
much data as | can before they decide to slit my throat.

Except now | am beginning to believe that they will not
hurt me.

| spoke to them yesterday after our “sleep.” Sometimes
they do not respond to questions and when they do the
responses are little better than the grunts or divergent
answers one receives from slow children. After their initial
question and invitation at our first encounter, none of them
originated a single query or comment my way.

| questioned them subtly, carefully, cautiously, and with
the professional calm of a trained ethnologist. | asked the
simplest, most factual questions possible to make sure that
the comlog was functioning properly. It was. But the sum
total of the answers left me almost as ignorant as | had been
twenty-some hours before.

Finally, tired in body and spirit, | abandoned professional
subtlety and asked the group | was sitting with, “Did you kill
my companion?”

My three interlocutors did not look up from the weaving
they were doing on a crude loom. “Yes,” said the one | have
come to think of as Aloha because he had been the first to

approach me in the forest, “we cut your companion’s throat
with sharpened stones and held him down and silent while
he struggled. He died the true death.”

“Why?” | asked after a moment. My voice sounded as dry
as acorn husk crumbling.

“Why did he die the true death?” said Alpha, still not
looking up. “Because all of his blood ran out and he stopped
breathing.”

“No,” | said. “Why did you kill him?”

Alpha did not respond, but Betty—who may or may not be
female and Alpha’s mate—looked up from her loom and said
simply, “To make him die.”

“Why?”

The responses invariably came back and just as invariably
failed to enlighten me one iota. After much questioning, |
had ascertained that they had killed Tuk to make him die
and that he had died because he had been killed.

“What is the difference between death and true death?” |
asked, not trusting the comlog or my temper at this point.

The third Bikura, Del, grunted a response that the comlog
interpreted as, “Your companion died the true death. You did
not.”

Finally, in frustration far too close to rage, | snapped, “Why
not? Why didn’t you kill me?”

All three stopped in the middle of their mindless weaving
and looked at me. “You cannot be killed because you cannot
die,” said Alpha. “You cannot die because you belong to the
cruciform and follow the way of the cross.”

| had no idea why the damn machine would translate cross
as “cross” one second and as “cruciform” the next. Because
you belong to the cruciform.

A chill went through me, followed by the urge to laugh.
Had | stumbled into that old adventure holo cliché—the lost
tribe that worshiped the “god” that had tumbled into their
jungle until the poor bastard cuts himself shaving or
something, and the tribespeople, assured and a bit relieved

at the obvious mortality of their visitor, offer up their
erstwhile deity as a sacrifice?

It would have been funny if the image of Tuk’s bloodless
face and raw-rimmed, gaping wound was not so fresh.

Their reaction to the cross certainly suggested that | had
encountered a group of survivors of a once Christian colony
—Catholics?—even though the data in the comlog insisted
that the dropship of seventy colonists who had crashed on
this plateau four hundred years ago had held only Neo-
Kerwin Marxists, all of whom should have been indifferent if
not openly hostile to the old religions.

| considered dropping the matter as being far too
dangerous to pursue, but my stupid need to know drove me
on. “Do you worship Jesus?” | asked.

Their blank expressions left no need for a verbal negative.

“Christ?” | tried again. “Jesus Christ? Christian? The
Catholic Church?”

No interest.

“Catholic? Jesus? Mary? St. Peter? Paul? St Teilhard?”

The comlog made noises but the words seemed to have no
meaning for them.

“You follow the cross?” | said, flailing for some last contact.

All three looked at me. “We belong to the cruciform,” said
Alpha.

| nodded, understanding nothing.

This evening | fell asleep briefly just before sunset and
when | awoke it was to the organ-pipe music of the Cleft’s
nightfall winds. It was much louder here on the village
ledges. Even the hovels seemed to join the chorus as the
rising gusts whistled and whined through stone gaps,
flapping fronds, and crude smokeholes.

Something was wrong. It took me a groggy minute to
realize that the village was abandoned. Every hut was
empty. | sat on a cold boulder and wondered if my presence
had sparked some mass exodus. The wind music had ended
and meteors were beginning their nightly show through

cracks in low clouds when | heard a sound behind me and
turned to find all seventy of the Three Score and Ten behind
me.

They walked past without a word and went to their huts.
There were no lights. | imagined them sitting in their hovels,
staring.

| stayed outside for some time before returning to my own
hut. After a while | walked to the edge of the grassy shelf
and stood where rock dropped away into the abyss. A cluster
of vines and roots clung to the cliff face but appeared to end
a few meters into space and hang there above emptiness.
No vine could have been long enough to offer a way to the
river two kilometers below.

But the Bikura had come from this direction.

Nothing made sense. | shook my head and went back to
my hut.

Sitting here, writing by the light of the comlog diskey, | try
to think of precautions | can take to insure that | will see the
sunrise.

| can think of none.

Day 103:

The more | learn, the less | understand.

| have moved most of my gear to the hut they leave empty
for me here in the village.

| have taken photographs, recorded video and audio chips,
and imaged a full holoscan of the village and its inhabitants.
They do not seem to care. | project their images and they
walk right through them, showing no interest. | play back
their words to them and they smile and go back into their
hovels to sit for hours, doing nothing, saying nothing. | offer
them trade trinkets and they take them without comment,
check to see if they are edible, and then leave them lying.
The grass is littered with plastic beads, mirrors, bits of
colored cloth, and cheap pens.

| have set up the full medical lab but to no avail; the Three
Score and Ten will not let me examine them, will not let me
take blood samples, even though | have repeatedly shown
them that it is painless, will not let me scan them with the
diagnostic equipment—will not, in short, cooperate in any
way. They do not argue. They do not explain. They simply
turn away and go about their nonbusiness.

After a week | still cannot tell the males from the females.
Their faces remind me of those visual puzzles that shift
forms as you stare; sometimes Betty’s face looks undeniably
female and ten seconds later the sense of gender is gone
and | think of her (him?) as Beta again. Their voices undergo
the same shift. Soft, well-modulated, sexless ... they remind
me of the poorly programmed homecomps one encounters
on backward worlds.

| find myself hoping to catch a glimpse of a naked Bikura.
This is not easy for a Jesuit of forty-eight standard years to
admit. Still, it would not be an easy task even for a veteran
voyeur. The nudity taboo seems absolute. They wear the
long robes while awake and during their two-hour midday
nap. They leave the village area to urinate and defecate,
and | suspect that they do not remove the loose robes even
then. They do not seem to bathe. One would suspect that
this would cause olfactory problems, but there is no odor
about these primitives except for the slight, sweet smell of
chalma. “You must undress sometimes,” | said to Alpha one
day, abandoning delicacy in favor of information. “No,” said
Al and went elsewhere to sit and do nothing while fully
dressed.

They have no names. | found this incredible at first, but
now I am sure.

“We are all that was and will be,” said the shortest Bikura,
one | think of as female and call Eppie. “We are the Three
score and Ten.”

| searched the comlog records and confirmed what |
suspected: in more than sixteen thousand known human

societies, none are listed where there are no individual
names at all. Even in the Lusus hive societies, individuals
respond to their class category followed by a simple code.

| tell them my name and they stare. “Father Paul Duré,
Father Paul Duré,” repeats the comlog translator but there is
no attempt at even simple repetition.

Except for their mass disappearances each day before
sunset and their common two-hour sleep time, they do very
little as a group. Even their lodging arrangements appear
random. A! will soend one naptime with Betty, the next with
Gam, and the third with Zelda or Pete. No system or
schedule is apparent. Every third day the entire group of
seventy goes into the forest to forage and returns with
berries, chalma roots and bark, fruit, and whatever else
might be edible. | was sure they were vegetarians until | saw
Del munching on the cold corpse of an infant arboreal. The
little primate must have fallen from the high branches. It
seems then that the Three Score and Ten do not disdain
meat; they simply are too stupid to hunt and kill it.

When the Bikura are thirsty they walk almost three
hundred meters to a stream that cascades into the Cleft. In
spite of this inconvenience, there are no signs of water skins,
jugs, or any type of pottery. | keep my reserve of water in
ten-gallon plastic containers but the villagers take no notice;
In my plummeting respect for these people, | do not find it
unlikely that they have spent generations in a village with
no handy water source.

“Who built the houses?” | ask. They have no word for
village.

“The Three Score and Ten,” responds Will. | can tell him
from the others only by a broken finger that did not mend
well. Each of them has at least one such distinguishing
feature, although sometimes | think it would be easier to tell
Crows apart.

“When did they build them?” | ask, although | should
know by now that any question that starts with “when” will

not receive an answer.

| receive no answer.

They do go into the Cleft each evening. Down the vines.
On the third evening, | tried to observe this exodus but six of
them turned me back from the edge and gently but
persistently brought me back to my but. It was the first
observable action of the Bikura that had hinted at
aggression and | sat in some apprehension after they had
gone.

The next evening as they departed | went quietly to my
hut, not even peering out, but after they returned | retrieved
the imager and its tripod from where | had left them near the
edge. The timer had worked perfectly. The holos showed the
Bikura grabbing the vines and scrambling down the cliff face
as nimbly as the little arboreals that fill the chalma and
weirwood fforests. Then they disappeared under the
overhang.

“What do you do when you go down the cliff each
evening?” | asked Al the next day.

The native looked at me with the seraphic, Buddha smile |
have learned to hate. “You belong to the cruciform,” he said
as if that answered everything.

“Do you worship when you go down the cliff?” | asked.

No answer.

| thought a minute. “I also follow the cross,” | said,
knowing that it would be translated as “belong to the
cruciform.” Any day now I will not need the translator
program. But this conversation was too important to leave to
chance. “Does this mean that I should join you when you go
down the cliff face?”

For a second | thought that Al was thinking. His brow
furrowed and | realized that it was the first time that | had
seen one of the Three Score and Ten come close to frowning.
Then he said, “You cannot. You belong to the cruciform but
you are not of the Three Score and Ten.”

| realized that it had taken every neuron and synapse in
his brain to frame that distinction.

“What would you do if | did go down the cliff face?” |
asked, expecting no response. Hypothetical questions
almost always had as much luck as my time-based queries.

This time he did respond. The seraphic smile and
untroubled countenance returned and Alpha said softly, “If
you try to go down the cliff we will hold you down on the
grass, take sharpened stones, cut your throat, and wait until
your blood stops flowing and your heart stops beating.”

| said nothing. | wondered if he could hear the pounding of
my heart at that moment. Well, | thought, at least you don’t
have to worry any longer that they think you are a god.

The silence stretched. Finally Al added one more sentence
that | have been thinking about ever since. “And if you did it
again,” he said, “we would have to kill you again.”

We stared at each other for some time after that; each
convinced, | am sure, that the other was a total idiot.

Day 104:

Each new revelation adds to my confusion.

The absence of children here has bothered me since my
first day in the village. Looking back through my notes, | find
frequent mention of it in the daily observations | have
dictated to my comlog, but no record of it in the personal
mishmash here that | call a journal. Perhaps the implications
were too frightening.

To my frequent and clumsy attempts at piercing this
mystery, the Three Score and Ten have offered their usual
enlightenment. The person questioned smiles beatifically
and responds in some non sequitur that would make the
babble of the Web’s worst village idiot seem like sage
aphorisms in comparison. More often than not, they do not
answer at all.

One day | stood in front of the one | have tagged as Del,
stayed there until he had to acknowledge my presence, and
asked, “Why are there no children?”

“We are the Three Score and Ten,” he said softly.

“Where are the babies?”

No response. No sense of evading the question, merely a
blank stare.

| took a breath. “Who is the youngest among you?”

Del appeared to be thinking, wrestling with the concept.
He was overmatched. | wondered if the Bikura had lost their
time sense so completely that any such question was
doomed. After a minute of silence, however, Del pointed to
where Al was crouched in the sunlight, working with his
crude hand loom, and said, “There is the last one to return.”

“To return?” | said. “From where?”

Del stared at me with no emotion, not even impatience.
“You belong to the cruciform,” he said. “You must know the
way of the cross.”

| nodded. | Knew enough to recognize that in this direction
lay one of the many conversational illogic-loops that usually
derailed our dialogues. | hunted for some way to keep a
grasp of the thin thread of information. “Then Al,” | said and
pointed, “is the last to be born. To return. But others
will ... return?”

| was not sure that | understood my own question. How
does one inquire about birth when the interviewee has no
word for child and no concept of time? But Del seemed to
understand. He nodded.

Encouraged, | asked, “Then when will the next of the Three
Score and Ten be born? Return?”

“No one can return until one dies,” he said.

Suddenly | thought | understood. “So no new
children ... no one will be returned until someone dies,” |
said. “You replace the missing one with another to keep the
group at Three Score and Ten?”

Del responded with the type of silence | had come to
interpret as assent.

The pattern seemed clear enough. The Bikura were quite
serious about their Three Score and Ten. They kept the tribal
population at seventy—the same number recorded on the
passenger list of the dropship that crashed here four
hundred years ago. Little chance of coincidence there. When
someone died, they allowed a child to be born to replace the
adult. Simple.

Simple but impossible. Nature and biology do not work
that neatly. Besides the problem of minimum-herd
population, there were other absurdities. Even though it is
difficult to tell the ages of these smooth-skinned people, it is
obvious that no more than ten years separates the oldest
from the youngest. Although they act like children, | would
guess their average age to be in the late thirties or mid-
forties in standard years. So where are the very old? Where
are the parents, aging uncles, and unmarried aunts? At this
rate, the entire tribe will enter old age at approximately the
same time. What happens when they all pass beyond
childbearing age and it comes time to replace members of
the tribe?

The Bikura lead dull, sedentary lives. The accident rate—
even while living on the very edge of the Cleft—must be low.
There are no predators. The seasonal variations are minimal
and the food supply almost certainly remains stable. But,
granted all this, there must have been times in the four-
hundred-year history of this baffling group when disease
swept the village, when more than the usual number of
vines gave way and dropped citizens into the Cleft, or when
something caused that abnormal cluster of sudden deaths
that insurance companies have dreaded since time
immemorial.

And then what? Do they breed to make up the difference
and then revert to their current sexless behavior? Are the
Bikura so different from every other recorded human society

that they have a rutting period once every few years—once
a decade?—once in a lifetime? It is doubtful.

| sit here in my hut and review the possibilities. One is that
these people live very long lifetimes and can reproduce
during most of that time, allowing for simple replacement of
tribal casualties. Only this does not explain their common
ages. And there is no mechanism to explain any such
longevity. The best anti-aging drugs the Hegemony has to
offer only manage to extend an active lifetime a bit over the
hundred standard-year mark. Preventive health measures
have spread the vitality of early middle age well into the late
sixties—my age—but except for clonal transplants,
bioengineering, and other perqs for the very rich, no one in
the Worldweb can expect to begin planning a family when
they are seventy or expect to dance at their hundred-and-
tenth birthday party. If eating chalma roots or breathing the
pure air of the Pinion Plateau had a dramatic effect on
retarding aging, it would be a sure bet that everyone on
Hyperion would be living here munching chalma, that this
planet would have had a farcaster centuries ago, and that
every citizen of the Hegemony who has a universal card
would be planning to spend vacations and retirement here.

No, a more logical conclusion is that the Bikura live
normal-length lives, have children at a normal rate, but kill
them unless a replacement is required. They may practice
abstinence or birth control—other than slaughtering the
newborn—until the entire band reaches an age where new
blood will soon be needed. A mass-birthing time explains the
apparent common age of the members of the tribe.

But who teaches the young? What happens to the parents
and other older people? Do the Bikura pass along the
rudiments of their crude excuse for a culture and then allow
their own deaths? Would this be a “true death”—the rubbing
out of an entire generation? Do the Three Score and Ten
murder individuals at both ends of the bell-shaped age
curve?

This type of speculation is useless. | am beginning to get
furious at my own lack of problem-solving skills. Let’s form a
strategy here and act on it, Paul. Get off your lazy, Jesuit ass.

proscem: How to tell the sexes apart?

so.ution: Cajole or coerce a few of these poor devils into a
medical exam. Find out what all the sex-role mystery and
nudity taboo is about. A society that depends upon years of
rigid sexual abstinence for population control is consistent
with my new theory.

prolem: Why are they so fanatical about maintaining the
Same Three Score and Ten population that the lost dropship
colony started with?

solution: Keep pestering them until you find out.

prosLem: Where are the children?

solution: Keep pressing and poking until you find out.
Perhaps the evening excursion down the cliff is related to all
of this. There may be a nursery there. Or a pile of small
bones.

proscem: What is this “belong to the cruciform” and “way of
the cross” business if not a contorted vestige of the original
colonists’ religious belief?

so.ution: Find out by going to the source. Could their daily
descent down the cliff be religious in nature?

proBLem: What is down the cliff face?

solution: GO down and see.

Tomorrow, if their pattern holds true, all threescore and ten
of the Three Scbre and Ten will wander into the woods for
several hours of foraging. This time | will not go with them.

This time | am going over the edge and down the cliff.

Day 105:

0930 hours—Thank You, O Lord, for allowing me to see
what | have seen today.

Thank You, O Lord, for bringing me to this place at this
time to see the proof of Your Presence.

1125 hours—Edouard ... Edouard!

| have to return. To show you all! To show everyone.

lve packed everything | need, putting the imager disks
and film in a pouch I wove from bestos leaves. | have food,
water, the maser with its weakening charge. Tent. Sleep
robes.

If only the arrestor rods had not been stolen!

The Bikura might have kept them. No, I’ve searched the
hovels and the nearby forest. They would have no use for
them.

It doesn’t matter!

l'Il leave today if | can. Otherwise, as soon as | can.

Edouard! | have it all here on the film and disks.

1400—

There is no way through the flame forests today. The
smoke drove me back even before | penetrated the edge of
the active zone.

| returned to the village and went over the holos. There is
no mistake. The miracle is real.

1530 hours—

The Three Score and Ten will return any moment. What if
they know ... what if they can tell by looking at me that |
have been there?

| could hide.

No, there is no need to hide. Cod did not bring me this far
and let me see what | have seen only to let me die at the
hands of these poor children.

1615 hours—

The Three Score and Ten returned and went to their huts
without giving me a glance.

| sit here in the doorway of my own hut and cannot keep
from smiling, from laughing, and from praying. Earlier |
walked to the edge of the Cleft, said Mass, and took
Communion. The villagers did not bother to watch.

How soon can | leave? Supervisor Orlandi and Tuk had said
that the flame forest was fully active for three local months
—a hundred and twenty days—then relatively quiet for two.
Tuk and | arrived here on Day 87....

| cannot wait another hundred days to bring the news to
the world ... to all of the worlds.

If only a skimmer would brave the weather and flame
forests and pluck me out of here. If only | could access one of
the datafix sats that serve the plantations.

Anything is possible. More miracles will occur.

2350 hours—

The Three Score and Ten have gone down into the Cleft.
The voices of the evening wind choir are rising all around.

How | wish | could be with them now! There, below.

| will do the next best thing. | will drop to my knees here
near the cliff edge and pray while the organ notes of the
planet and sky sing what | now know is a hymn to a real and
present God.

Day 106:

| awoke today to a perfect morning. The sky was a deep
turquoise; the sun was a Sharp, blood-red stone set within. |
stood outside my hut as the mists cleared, the arboreals
ended their morning screech concert, and the air began to
warm. Then | went in and viewed my tapes and disks.

| realize that in yesterday’s excited scribblings |
mentioned nothing of what | found down the cliff. | will do so
now. | have the disks, filmtapes, and comlog notes, but there
is always the chance that only these personal journals will
be found.

| lowered myself over the cliff edge at approximately 0730
hours yesterday morning. The Bikura were all foraging in the
forest. The descent on vines had looked simple enough—
they were bound around one another sufficiently to create a
sort of ladder in most places—but as | swung out and began

to let myself down, | could feel my heart pounding hard
enough to be painful. There was a sheer three-thousand-
meter drop to the rocks and river below. | kept a tight grip on
at least two vines at all times and centimetered my way
down, trying not to look at the abyss beneath my feet.

It took me the better part of an hour to descend the
hundred and fifty meters that | am sure the Bikura can cover
in ten minutes. Eventually | reached the curve of an
overhang. Some vines trailed away into space but most of
them curled under the sheer slab of rock toward the cliff wall
thirty meters in. Here and there the vines appeared to have
been braided to form crude bridges upon which the Bikura
probably walked with little or no help from their hands. |
crawled along these braided strands, clutching other vines
for support and uttering prayers | had not said since my
boyhood. | stared straight ahead as if | could forget that
there was only a seemingly infinite expanse of air under
those swaying, creaking strands of vegetable matter.

There was a broad ledge along the cliff wall. | allowed
three meters of it to separate me from the gulf before |
squeezed through the vines and dropped two and a half
meters to the stone.

The ledge was about five meters wide and it terminated a
short distance to the northeast where the great mass of the
overhang began. | followed a path along the ledge to the
southwest and had gone twenty or thirty paces before |
stopped in shock. It was a path. A path worn out of solid
stone. Its shiny surface had been pushed centimeters below
the level of the surrounding rock. Farther on, where the path
descended a curving lip of ledge to a lower, wider level,
steps had been cut into the stone but even these had been
worn to the point that they seemed to sag in the middle.

| sat down for a second as the impact of this simple fact
struck me. Even four centuries of daily travel by the Three
Score and Ten could not account for such erosion of solid
rock. Someone or something had used this path long before

the Bikura colonists crashed here. Someone or something
had used this path for millennia.

| stood and walked on. There was little noise except for the
wind blowing gently along the half-kilometer-wide Cleft. |
realized that | could hear the soft sound of the river far
below.

The path curved left around a section of cliff and ended. |
stepped out onto a broad apron of gently descending stone
and stared. | believe | made the sign of the cross without
thinking.

Because this ledge ran due north and south for a hundred-
meter cut of cliff, | could look due west along a thirty-
kilometer slash of Cleft to open sky where the plateau
ended. | realized at once that the setting sun would
illuminate this slab of cliff wall under the overhang each
evening. It would not have surprised me if—on the spring or
autumn solstice—Hyperion’s sun would, from this vantage
point, appear to set directly into the Cleft, its red sides just
touching the pink-toned rock walls.

| turned left and stared at the cliff face. The worn path led
across the wide ledge to doors carved into the vertical slab
of stone. No, these were not merely doors, they were portals,
intricately carved portals with elaborate stone casements
and lintels. To either side of these twin doors spread broad
windows of stained glass, rising at least twenty meters
toward the overhang. | went closer and inspected the
facade. Whoever had built this had done so by widening the
area under the overhang, slicing a sheer, smooth wall into
the granite of the plateau, and then tunneling directly into
the cliff face. | ran my hand over the deeply cut folds of
ornamental carving around the door. Smooth. Everything
had been smoothed and worn and softened by time, even
here, hidden away from most of the elements by the
protective lip. of overhang. How many thousands of years
had this ... temple ... been carved into the south wall of the
Cleft?

The stained glass was neither glass nor plastic but some
thick, translucent substance that seemed as hard as the
surrounding stone to the touch. Nor was the window a
composite of panels; the colors swirled, shaded, melded, and
blended into one another like oil on water.

| removed my flashlight from the pack, touched one of the
doors, and hesitated as the tall portal swung inward with
frictionless ease.

| entered the vestibule—there is no other word for it—
crossed the silent ten-meter space, and paused in front of
another wall made from the same stained-glass material that
even now glowed behind me, filling the vestibule with thick
light of a hundred subtle hues. | realized instantly that at
the sunset hour the direct rays of the sun would fill this room
with incredibly deep shafts of color, would strike the stained-
glass wall in front of me, and would illuminate whatever lay
beyond.

| found the single door, outlined by thin, dark metal set
into the stained-glass stone, and | passed through it.

On Pacem we have—as best we could from ancient photos
and holos—rebuilt the basilica of St. Peter’s exactly as it
stood in the ancient Vatican. Almost seven hundred feet
long and four hundred and fifty feet wide, the church can
hold fifty thousand worshipers when His Holiness says Mass.
We have never had more than five thousand faithful there
even when the Council of Bishops of All the Worlds is in
assembly every forty-three years. In the central apse near
our copy of Bernini’s Throne of St. Peter, the great dome
rises more than a hundred and thirty meters above the floor
of the altar. It is an impressive space.

This space was larger.

In the dim light | used the beams of my flashlight to
ascertain that | was in a single great room—a giant hall
hollowed out of solid stone. | estimated that the smooth
walls rose to a ceiling that must be only a few meters
beneath the surface of the crag where the Bikura had set

their huts. There was no ornamentation here, no furniture,
no sign of any concession to form or function except for the
object that sat squarely in the center of this huge, echoing
cave of a room.

Centered in the great hall was an altar—a _ five-meter-
square slab of stone left when the rest was hollowed out—
and from this altar rose a cross.

Four meters high, three meters wide, carved in the old
style of the elaborate crucifixes of Old Earth, the cross faced
the stained-glass wall as if awaiting the sun and the
explosion of light that would ignite the inlaid diamonds,
sapphires, blood crystals, lapis beads, queen’s tears, onyxes,
and other precious stones that | could make out in the light
of the flashlight as | approached.

| knelt and prayed. Shutting off the flashlight, | waited
several minutes before my eyes could discern the cross in
the dim, smoky light. This was, without a doubt, the
cruciform of which the Bikura spoke. And it had been set
here a minimum of many thousands of years ago—perhaps
tens of thousands—long before mankind first left Old Earth.
Almost certainly before Christ taught in Galilee.

| prayed.

Today | sit out in the sunlight after reviewing the
holodisks. | have confirmed what | barely noticed during my
return up the cliff after discovering what | now think of as
“the basilica.” On the ledge outside the basilica there are
steps descending farther into the Cleft. Although not as
worn as the path leading to the basilica, they are equally
intriguing. God alone knows what other wonders wait below.

| must let the worlds know of this find!

The irony of my being the one to discover this is not lost
on me. If it had not been for Armaghast and my exile, this
discovery might have waited more centuries. The Church
might have died before this revelation could have brought
new life to it.

But | have found it.

One way or the other, | will leave or get my message out.

Day 107:

| am a prisoner.

This morning | was bathing in my usual place near where
the, stream drops over the cliff edge when | heard a sound
and looked up to see the Bikura | call Del staring at me with
wide eyes. | called a greeting but the little Bikura turned and
ran. It was perplexing. They rarely hurry. Then | realized that
even though | had been wearing trousers at the time, | had
undoubtedly violated their nudity taboo by allowing Del to
see me naked from the waist up.

| smiled, shook my head, finished dressing, and returned
to the village. If | had known what awaited me there, | would
not have been amused.

The entire Three Score and Ten stood watching as |
approached.

| stopped a dozen paces from Al. “Good afternoon,” | said.

Alpha pointed and half a dozen of the Bikura lunged
toward me, seized my arms and legs, and pinned me to the
ground. Beta stepped forward and removed a sharp-edged
stone from his or her robes. As | struggled in vain to pull
free, Beta cut my clothes down the front and pulled apart
the shreds until | was all but naked.

| ceased struggling as the mob pressed forward. They
stared at my pale, white body and murmured to themselves.
| could feel my heart pounding. “I am sorry if | have offended
your laws,” | began, “but there is no reason ...”

“Silence,” said Alpha and spoke to the tall Bikura with the
scar on his palm—the one | call Zed. “He is not of the
cruciform.”

Zed nodded.

“Let me explain,” | began again, but Alpha silenced me
with a backhanded slap that left my lip bleeding and my
ears ringing. There had been no more sense of hostility in

his action than | would have shown in silencing a comlog by
throwing a switch.

“What are we to do with him?” asked Alpha.

“Those who do not follow the cross must die the true
death,” said Beta and the crowd shifted forward. Many had
sharpened stones in their hands. “Those not of the cruciform
must die the true death,” said Beta and her voice held the
tone of complacent finality common to oft-repeated
formulae and religious litanies.

“| follow the cross!” | cried out as the crowd tugged me to
my feet. | grabbed at the crucifix that hung around my neck
and struggled against the pressure of many arms. Finally |
managed to lift the little cross over my head.

Alpha held up his hand and the crowd paused. In the
sudden silence | could hear the river three kilometers below
in the Cleft.

“He does carry a cross,” said Alpha.

Del pressed forward. “But he is not of the cruciform! | saw.
It was not as we thought. He is not of the cruciform!” There
was murder in his voice.

| cursed myself for being careless and stupid. The future of
the Church depended upon my survival and | had thrown
both away by beguiling myself into believing that the Bikura
were dull, harmless children.

“Those who do not follow the cross must die the true
death,” repeated Beta. It was a final sentencing.

Stones were being raised by seventy hands when |
shouted, knowing that it was either my last chance or my
final condemnation. “I have been down the cliff and
worshiped at your altar! | follow the cross!”

Alpha and the mob hesitated. | could see that they were
wrestling with this new thought. It was not easy for them.

“| follow the cross and wish to be of the cruciform,” | said
as calmly as | could, “I have been to your altar.”

“Those who do not follow the cross must die the true
death,” called Gamma.

“But he follows the cross,” said Alpha. “He has prayed in
the room.”

“This cannot be,” said Zed. “The Three Score and Ten pray
there and he is not of the Three Score and Ten.”

“We knew before this that he is not of the Three Score and
Ten,” said Alpha, frowning slightly as he dealt with the
concept of past tense.

“He is not of the cruciform,” said Delta-two.

“Those who are not of the cruciform must die the true
death,” said Beta.

“He follows the cross,” said Alpha. “Can he not then
become of the cruciform?”

An outcry arose. In the general babble and shuffle of forms
| pulled against restraining hands but their grips remained
firm.

“He is not of the Three Score and Ten and is not of the
cruciform,” said Beta, sounding more puzzled than hostile
now. “How is it that he should not die the true death? We
must take the stones and open his throat so that the blood
flows until his heart stops. He is not of the cruciform.”

“He follows the cross,” said Alpha. “Can he not become of
the cruciform?”

This time silence followed the question.

“He follows the cross and has prayed at the room of the
cruciform,” said Alpha. “He must not die the true death.”

“All die the true death,” said a Bikura whom | did not
recognize. My arms were aching from the strain of holding
the crucifix above my head. “Except the Three Score and
Ten,” finished the anonymous Bikura.

“Because they followed the cross, prayed at the room, and
became of the cruciform,” said Alpha. “Must he not then
become of the cruciform?”

| stood there gripping the cold metal of the small cross and
awaited their verdict. | was afraid to die—I felt afraid—but
the larger part of my mind seemed almost detached. My

greatest regret was that | would not be able to send out the
news of the basilica to an unbelieving universe.

“Come, we will talk of this,” Beta said to the group and
they pulled me with them as they trod silently back to the
village.

They have imprisoned me here in my hut. There was no
chance to try for the hunting maser; several of them held
me down while they emptied the hut of most of my
possessions. They took my clothing, leaving me only one of
their rough-woven robes to cover myself with.

The longer I sit here the more angry and anxious | become.
They have taken my comlog, imager, disks,
chips ... everything. | have a single, unopened crate of
medical diagnostic equipment left up at the old site, but
that cannot help me document the miracle in the Cleft. If
they destroy the things they have taken—and then destroy
me—there will be no record of the basilica.

If | had a weapon | could kill the guards and

oh dear Cod what am | thinking? Edouard, what am | to
do?

And even if | survive this—make my way back to Keats—
arrange travel back to the Web—who would believe me?—
after nine years’ absence from Pacem because of the
quantum-leap time-debt—just an old man returning with the
same lies he was exiled for—

Oh, dear God, if they destroy the data, let them destroy
me as well.

Day 110:

After three days they have decided my fate.

Zed and the one | think of as Theta-Prime came to get me
Shortly after midday. | blinked as they led me out into the
light. The Three Score and Ten stood in a wide semicircle
near the cliff edge. | fully expected to be thrown over that
edge. Then | noticed the bonfire.

| had assumed that the Bikura were so primitive that they
had lost the art of making and using fire. They did not warm
themselves with fire and their huts were always dark. | had
never seen them cook a meal, not even the rare corpse of an
arboreal they devoured. But now the fire was burning
strongly and they were the only ones who could have
started it. | looked to see what fueled the flames.

They were burning my clothes, my comlog, my field notes,
the tape cassettes, video chips, data disks, the
imager ... everything that had held information. | screamed
at them, tried to throw myself at the fire, and called them
names | had not used since the street days of my childhood.
They ignored me.

Finally Alpha came close. “You will become of the
cruciform,” he said softly.

| did not care. They led me back to my hut where | wept for
an hour. There is no guard at the door. A minute ago | stood
at the doorway and considered running for the flame forests.
Then | thought of a much shorter but no less fatal run to the
Cleft.

| did nothing.

The sun will be setting in a short time. Already the winds
are rising. Soon. Soon.

Day 112:

Has it been only two days? It has been forever.

It did not come off this morning. /t did not come off.

The medscanner’s image wafer is right here in front of me
but I still cannot believe it. And yet | do. | am of the
cruciform now.

They came for me just before sunset. All of them. | did not
struggle as they led me to the edge of the Cleft. They were
more agile on the vines than | could have imagined. | slowed
them down but they were patient, showing me the easiest
footholds, the fastest route.

Hyperion’s sun had dropped below low clouds and was
visible above the rim wall to the west as we walked the final
few meters to the basilica. The evening windsong was louder
than | had anticipated; it was as if we were caught amid the
pipes of a gigantic church organ. The notes rose from bass
growls so deep that my bones and teeth resonated in
sympathy to high, piercing screams that slid easily into the
ultrasonic.

Alpha opened the outer doors and we passed through the
antechamber into the central basilica. The Three Score and
Ten made a wide circle around the altar and its tall cross.
There was no litany. There was no singing. There was no
ceremony. We simply stood there in silence as the wind
roared through the fluted columns outside and echoed in the
great empty room carved into the stone—echoed and
resonated and grew in volume until | clapped my hands over
my ears. And all the while the streaming, horizontal rays of
sunlight filled the hall with deepening hues of amber, gold,
lapis, and then amber again—colors so deep that they made
the air thick with light and lay like paint against the skin, |
watched as the cross caught this light and held it in each of
its thousand precious stones, held it—it seemed—even after
the sun had set and the windows had faded to a twilight
gray. It was as if the great crucifix had absorbed the light
and was radiating it toward us, into us. Then even the cross
was dark and the winds died and in the sudden dimness
Alpha said softly, “Bring him along.”

We emerged onto the wide ledge of stone and Beta was
there with torches. As Beta passed them out to a selected
few, | wondered if the Bikura reserved fire for ritual purposes
only. Then Beta was leading the way and we descended the
narrow staircase carved into the stone.

At first | crept along, terrified, clutching at the smooth rock
and searching for any reassuring projection of root or stone.
The drop to our right was so sheer and endless that it
bordered on being absurd. Descending the ancient staircase

was far worse than clutching at vines on the cliff face above.
Here | had to look down each time | placed a foot on the
narrow, age-slickened slabs. A slip and fall at first seemed
probable, then inevitable.

| had the urge to stop then, to return at least to the safety
of the basilica, but most of the Three Score and Ten were
behind me on the narrow staircase and there seemed little
chance that they would stand aside to let me pass. Besides
this, and even greater than my fear, was the nagging
curiosity about what was at the bottom of the staircase. | did
pause long enough to glance up at the lip of the Cleft three
hundred meters above and to see that the clouds were gone,
the stars were out, and the nightly ballet of meteor trails was
bright against a sable sky. Then | lowered my head, began a
whispered recitation of the rosary, and followed the
torchlight and the Bikura into the treacherous depths.

| could not believe that the staircase would take us all the
way to the bottom of the Cleft, but it did. When, sometime
after midnight, | realized that we would be descending all
the way down to the level of the river, | estimated that it
would take us until noon of the next day, but it did not.

We reached the base of the Cleft shortly before sunrise.
The stars still shone in the aperture of sky between cliff walls
that rose an impossible distance on either side. Exhausted,
staggering downward step by step, recognizing slowly that
there were no more steps, | stared upward and wondered
stupidly if the stars remained visible there in the daylight as
they did in a well | had lowered myself into once as a child in
Villefranche-sur-Sa6ne.

“Here,” said Beta. It was the first word uttered in many
hours and was barely audible over the roar of the river. The
Three Score and Ten stopped where they were and stood
motionless. | collapsed to my knees and fell on my side.
There was no possibility that | could climb that stairway we
had just descended. Not in a day. Not in a week. Perhaps
never. | closed my eyes to sleep but the dull fuel of nervous

tension continued to burn inside me. | looked out across the
floor of the ravine. The river here was wider than | had
anticipated, at least seventy meters across, and the noise of
it was beyond mere noise; | felt that | was being consumed
by a great beast’s roar.

| sat up and stared at a patch of darkness in the opposing
cliff wall. It was a shadow darker than the shadows, more
regular than the serrated patchwork of buttresses and
crevices and columns that mottled the face of the cliff. It was
a perfect square of darkness, at least thirty meters to a side.
A door or hole in the cliff wall. | struggled to my feet and
looked downriver along the wall we had just descended; yes,
it was there. The other entrance, the one toward which Beta
and the others even now were walking, was faintly visible in
the starlight.

| had found an entrance to Hyperion’s labyrinth.

“Did you know that Hyperion was one of the nine
labyrinthine worlds?” someone had asked me on the
dropship. Yes, it was the young priest named Hoyt. | had said
yes and dismissed the fact. | was interested in the Bikura—
actually more in the self-inflicted pain of my own exile—not
the labyrinths or their builders.

Nine worlds have labyrinths. Nine out of a hundred
seventy-six Webworlds and another two hundred-some
colonial and protectorate planets. Nine worlds out of eight
thousand or more worlds explored—however cursorily—since
the Hegira.

There are planetary archaeohistorians who devote their
lives to the study of the labyrinths. Not |. | had always found
them a sterile topic, vaguely unreal. Now | walked toward
one with the Three Score and Ten as the Kans River roared
and vibrated and threatened to douse our torches with its
spray.

The labyrinths were dug ... tunneled ... created more than
three quarters of a million standard years ago. The details
were inevitably the same, their origins inevitably unsolved.

Labyrinthine worlds are always Earthlike, at least to 7.9 on
the Solmev Scale, always circling a G-type star, and yet
always restricted to worlds that are tectonically dead, more
like Mars than Old Earth. The tunnels themselves are set
deep—usually a minimum of ten kilometers but often as
deep as thirty—and they catacomb the crust of the planet.
On Svoboda, not far from Pacem’s system, over eight
hundred thousand kilometers of labyrinth have been
explored by remotes. The tunnels on each world are thirty
meters square and carved by some technology still not
available to the Hegemony. | read once in an archaeological
journal that Kemp-Holtzer and Weinstein had postulated a
“fusion tunneler” that would explain the perfectly smooth
walls and lack of tailings, but their theory did not explain
where the Builders or their machines had come from or why
they had devoted centuries to such an apparently aimless
engineering task. Each of the labyrinthine worlds—including
Hyperion—has been probed and researched. Nothing has
ever been found. No signs of excavation machinery, no
rusting miner’s helmets, not a single piece of shattered
plastic or decomposing stimstick wrapper. Researchers have
not even identified entrance and exit shafts. No suggestion
of heavy metals or precious ores has been sufficient to
explain such a monumental effort. No legend or artifact of
the Labyrinth Builders has survived. The mystery had mildly
intrigued me over the years but never concerned me. Until
now.

We entered the tunnel mouth. It was not a perfect square.
Erosion and gravity had turned the perfect tunnel into a
rough cave for a hundred meters into the cliff wall. Beta
stopped just where the tunnel floor grew smooth and
extinguished his torch. The other Bikura did likewise.

It was very dark. The tunnel had turned enough to block
out any starlight that might have entered. | had been in
caves before. With the torches extinguished, | did not expect
my eyes to adapt to the near-total darkness. But they did.

Within thirty seconds | began to sense a roseate glow, dim
at first, then ever richer until the cave was brighter than the
canyon had been, brighter than Pacem under the glow of its
triune moons. The light came from a hundred sources—a
thousand sources. | was able to make out the nature of these
sources just as the Bikura dropped reverently to their knees.

The cave walls and ceiling were encrusted with crosses
ranging in size from a few millimeters to almost a meter
long. Each glowed with a deep, pink light of its own.
Invisible in the torchlight, these glowing crosses now
suffused the tunnel with light. | approached one embedded
in the wall nearest me. Thirty or so centimeters across, it
pulsed with a soft, organic glow. This was not something that
had been carved out of stone or attached to the wall; it was
definitely organic, definitely alive, resembling soft coral. It
was slightly warm to the touch.

There came the slightest whisper of sound—no, not sound,
a disturbance in the cool air, perhaps—and | turned in time
to see something enter the chamber.

The Bikura were still kneeling, their heads down, eyes
lowered.

| remained standing. My gaze never left the thing which
moved among the kneeling Bikura.

It was vaguely man-shaped but in no way human. It stood
at least three meters tall. Even when it was at rest, the
silvered surface of the thing seemed to shift and flow like
mercury suspended in midair. The reddish glow from the
crosses set into the tunnel walls reflected from sharp
surfaces and glinted on the curved metal blades protruding
from the thing’s forehead, four wrists, oddly jointed elbows,
knees, armored back, and thorax. It flowed between the
kneeling Bikura, and when it extended four long arms,
hands extended but fingers clicking into place like chrome
scalpels, | was absurdly reminded of His Holiness on Pacem
offering a benediction to the faithful.

| had no doubt that | was looking at the legendary Shrike.

At that moment | must have moved or made a sound, for
large red eyes turned my way and | found myself hypnotized
by the dance of light within the multifaceted prisms there:
not merely reflected light but a fierce, blood-bright glow
which seemed to burn within the creature’s barbed skull and
pulse in the terrible gems set where God meant eyes to be.

Then it moved ... or, rather, it did not move but ceased
being there and was here, leaning less than a meter from
me, its oddly jointed arms encircling me in a fence of body-
blades and liquid silver steel. Panting hard but unable to
take a breath, | saw my own reflection, face white and
distorted, dancing across the surface of the thing’s metallic
shell and burning eyes.

| confess that | felt something closer to exaltation than
fear. Something inexplicable was happening. Forged in Jesuit
logic and tempered in the cold bath of science, |
nevertheless understood at that second the ancient
obsession of the God-fearing for another kind of fear: the
thrill of exorcism, the mindless whirl of Dervish possession,
the puppet-dance ritual of Tarot, and the almost erotic
surrender of seance, speaking in tongues, and Zen Gnostic
trance. | realized at that instant just how surely the
affirmation of demons or the summoning of Satan somehow
can affirm the reality of their mystic antithesis—the God of
Abraham.

Thinking none of this but feeling all of it, | awaited the
embrace of the Shrike with the imperceptible tremble of a
virgin bride.

It disappeared.

There was no thunderclap, no sudden smell of brimstone,
not even a scientifically sound inrush of air. One second the
thing was there, surrounding me with its beautiful certainty
of sharp-edged death, and the next instant it was gone.

Numbed, | stood there and blinked as Alpha rose and
approached me in the Bosch-tinted gloom. He stood where
the Shrike had stood, his own arms extended in a pathetic

imitation of the deadly perfection | had just witnessed, but
there was no sign on Alpha’s bland, Bikura face that he had
seen the creature. He made an awkward, open-handed
gesture which seemed to include the labyrinth, cave wall,
and scores of glowing crosses embedded there.

“Cruciform,” said Alpha. The Three Score and Ten rose,
came closer, and knelt again. | looked at their placid faces in
the soft light and | also knelt.

“You will follow the cross all of your days,” said Alpha, and
his voice carried the cadence of litany. The rest of the Bikura
repeated the statement in a tone just short of a chant.

“You will be of the cruciform all of your days,” said Alpha,
and as the others repeated this he reached out and pulled a
small cruciform away from the cave wall. It was not more
than a dozen centimeters long and it came away from the
wall with the faintest of snaps. Its glow faded even as |
watched. Alpha removed a small thong from his robe, tied it
around small knobs at the top of the cruciform, and held the
cross above my head. “You will be of the cruciform now and
forever,” he said.

“Now and forever,” echoed the Bikura.

“Amen,” | whispered.

Beta signaled that | should open the front of my robe.
Alpha lowered the small dross until it hung around my neck.
It felt cool against my chest; the back of it was perfectly flat,
perfectly smooth.

The Bikura stood and wandered toward the cave entrance,
apparently apathetic and indifferent once again. | watched
them leave and then | gingerly touched the cross, lifted and
inspected it. The cruciform was cool, inert. If it had truly
been living a few seconds earlier, it showed no sign of it
now. It continued to feel more like coral than crystal or rock;
there was no sign of any adhesive material on the smooth
back of it. | soeculated on photochemical effects that would
have created the luminescent quality. | speculated on
natural phosphors, bioluminescence, and on the chances

that evolution would shape such things. | speculated on
what, if anything, their presence here had to do with the
labyrinth and on the aeons necessary to raise this plateau so
the river and canyon could slice through one of the tunnels.
| speculated on the basilica and its makers, on the Bikura, on
the Shrike, and on myself. Eventually | ceased speculating
and closed my eyes to pray.

When I emerged from the cave, the cruciform cool against
my chest under the robe, the Three Score and Ten were
obviously ready to begin the three-kilometer climb up the
staircase. | looked up to see a pale slash of morning sky
between the walls of the Cleft.

“No!” | shouted, my voice almost lost against the roar of
the river.

“| need rest. Rest!” | sank to my knees on the sand but half
a dozen of the Bikura approached, pulled me gently to my
feet, and moved me toward the staircase.

| tried, the Lord knows that | tried, but two or three hours
into the climb | felt my legs give way and | collapsed, sliding
across the rock, unable to stop my six-hundred-meter fall to
the rocks and river. | remember grasping at the cruciform
under the thick robe and then half a dozen hands stopped
my slide, lifted me, carried me. Then | remember no more.

Until this morning. | awoke to a sunrise pouring light
through the opening of my hut. | wore only the robe and a
touch assured me that the cruciform was still hanging from
its fibrous thong. As | watched the sun lift over the forest, |
realized that | had lost a day, that somehow | had slept
through not only my ascent up that endless staircase (how
could these little people carry me two and a half vertical
kilometers?) but through the next day and night as well.

| looked around my hut. My comlog and other recording
devices were gone. Only my medscanner and a few packets
of anthropological software made useless by the destruction
of my other equipment remained. | shook my head and went
up to the stream to wash.

The Bikura appeared to be sleeping. Now that | had
participated in their ritual and “become of the cruciform,”
they seemed to have lost interest in me. As | stripped to
bathe, | decided to take no interest in them. | decided that |
would leave as soon as | was strong enough. | would find a
way around the flame forests if necessary. | could descend
the staircase and follow the Kans if | had to. | knew more
than ever that word of these miraculous artifacts had to be
brought to the outside world.

| pulled off the heavy robe, stood pale and shivering in the
morning light, and went to lift the small cruciform from my
chest.

It did not come off.

It lay there as if it were part of my flesh. | pulled, scraped,
and tore at the thong until it snapped and fell away. | clawed
at the cross-shaped lump on my chest. /t did not come off. It
was as if my flesh had sealed itself around the edges of the
cruciform. Except for the scratches from my fingernails,
there was no pain or physical sensation in the cruciform or
surrounding flesh, only sheer terror in my soul at the
thought of this thing attached to me. After the first rush of
panic subsided, | sat a minute and then hastily pulled on my
robe and ran back to the village.

My knife was gone, my maser, scissors, razor—everything
that might have helped me peel back the growth on my
chest. My nails left bloody tracks across the red welt and my
chest. Then | remembered the medscanner. | passed the
transceiver over my chest, read the diskey display, shook
my head in disbelief, and then ran an entire body scan. After
a while | keyed in a request for hard copies of the scan
results and sat motionless for a very long time.

| sit here now holding the image wafers. The cruciform is
quite visible on both the sonic and k-cross images ... aS are
the internal fibers that spread like thin tentacles, like roots,
throughout my body.

Excess ganglia radiate from a thick nucleus above my
sternum to filaments everywhere—a nightmare of
nematodes. As well as | can tell with my simple field
scanner, the nematodes terminate in the amygdala and
other basal ganglia in each cerebral hemisphere. My
temperature, metabolism, and lymphocyte level are normal.
There has been no invasion of foreign tissue. According to
the scanner, the nematodic filaments are the result of
extensive but simple metastasis. According to the scanner,
the cruciform itself is composed of familiar tissue ... the DNA
is mine.

| am of the cruciform.

Day 116:

Each day | pace the confines of my cage—the flame forests
to the south and east, the forested ravines to the northeast,
and the Cleft to the north and west. The Three Score and Ten
will not let me descend into the Cleft beyond the basilica.
The cruciform will not let me get more than ten kilometers
from the Cleft.

At first | could not believe this. | had resolved to enter the
flame forests, trusting to luck and to God’s help to see me
through. But | had gone no more than two kilometers into
the fringes of the forest when pain struck me in the chest
and arms and head. | was sure that | was having a massive
heart attack. But as soon as | turned back toward the Cleft
the symptoms ceased. | experimented for some time and the
results were invariably the same. Whenever | ventured
deeper into the flame forest, away from the Cleft, the pain
would return and increase in severity until | turned back.

| begin to understand other things. Yesterday | happened
across the wreckage of the original seedship shuttle as |
explored to the north. Only a rusted, vine-enmeshed wreck
of metal remains among the rocks at the edge of the flame
forest near the ravine. But crouching among the exposed

alloy ribs of the ancient craft, | could imagine the rejoicing of
the seventy survivors, their short voyage to the Cleft, their
eventual discovery of the basilica, and ... and what?
Conjectures beyond that point are useless, but suspicions
remain. Tomorrow | will attempt another physical exam of
one of the Bikura. Perhaps now that | am “of the cruciform”
they will allow it.

Each day | do a medscan of myself. The nematodes remain
—perhaps thicker, perhaps not. | am convinced that they are
purely parasitic although my body has shown no signs of
this. | peer at my face in the pool near the waterfall and see
only the same long, aging countenance that | have learned
to dislike in recent years. This morning, while gazing at my
image in the water, | opened my mouth wide, half thinking
that | would see gray filaments and nematode clusters
growing from the roof of my mouth and the back of my
throat. There was nothing.

Day 117:

The Bikura are sexless. Not celibate or hermaphroditic or
undeveloped—sexless. They are as devoid of external or
internal genitalia as a child’s flowfoam doll. There is no
evidence that the penis or testes or comparable female
organs have atrophied or been surgically altered. There is no
sign that they ever existed. Urine is conducted through a
primitive urethra terminating in a small chamber contiguous
with the anus—a sort of crude cloaca.

Beta allowed the examination. The medscanner confirmed
what my eyes would not believe. Del and Theta also agreed
to be scanned. | have absolutely no doubt that the rest of
the Three Score and Ten are equally sexless. There is no sign
that they have been ... altered. | would suggest that they
had all been born that way but from what kind of parents?
And how do these sexless lumps of human clay plan to

reproduce? It must be tied in with the cruciform in some
Way.

When | was finished with their medscans | stripped and
studied myself. The cruciform rises from my chest like pink
scar tissue, but | am still a man.

For how long?

Day 133:

Alpha is dead.

| was with him three mornings ago when he fell. We were
about three kilometers east, hunting for chalma tubers in
the large boulders near the edge of the Cleft. It had been
raining most of the past two days and the rocks were quite
Slippery. | looked up from my own scrambling just in time to
see Alpha lose his footing and go sliding down a broad slab
of stone, over the edge. He did not shout, The only sound
was the rasp of his robe against the rock, followed several
seconds later by the sickening dropped-melon sound of his
body striking a ledge eighty meters below.

It took me an hour to find a route down to him. Even
before | began the treacherous descent | knew it was too late
to help. But it was my duty.

Alpha’s body was half wedged between two large rocks.
He must have died instantly; his arms and legs were
splintered and the right side of his skull had been crushed.
Blood and brain tissue clung to the wet rock like the refuse
of a sad picnic. | wept as | stood over the little body. | do not
know why | wept, but | did. And as | wept | administered
Extreme Unction and prayed that God would accept the soul
of this poor, sexless little person. Later | wrapped the body in
vines, laboriously climbed the eighty meters of cliff, and—
pausing frequently to pant with exhaustion—pulled the
broken corpse up to me.

There was little interest as | carried the body of Alpha into
the Bikura village. Eventually Beta and half a dozen others

wandered over to stare down indifferently at the corpse. No
one asked me how he had died. After a few minutes the
small crowd dispersed.

Later | carried Alpha’s body to the promontory where | had
buried Tuk so many weeks earlier. | was digging the shallow
grave with a flat stone when Gamma appeared. The Bikura’s
eyes widened and for a brief second | thought | saw emotion
cross those bland features.

“What are you doing?” asked Gamma.

“Burying him.” | was too tired to say more. | leaned against
a thick chalma root and rested.

“No.” It was a command. “He is of the cruciform.”

| stared as Gamma turned and walked quickly back to the
village. When the Bikura was gone, | pulled off the crude
fiber tarp | had draped over the corpse.

Alpha was, without any doubt, truly dead. It no longer
mattered to him or the universe whether he was of the
cruciform or not. The fall had stripped him of most of his
clothes and all of his dignity. The right side of his skull had
been cracked and emptied like a breakfast egg. One eye
stared sightlessly toward Hyperion’s sky through a
thickening film while the other looked out lazily from under
a drooping lid. His rib cage had been splintered so
thoroughly that shards of bone protruded from his flesh.
Both arms were broken and his left leg had been twisted
almost off. | had used the med-scanner to perform a
perfunctory autopsy and it had revealed massive internal
injuries; even the poor devil’s heart had been pulped by the
force of the fall.

| reached out and touched the cold flesh. Rigor mortis was
setting in. My fingers brushed across the cross-shaped welt
on his chest and | quickly pulled my hand away. The
cruciform was warm.

“Stand away.”

| looked up to see Beta and the rest of the Bikura standing
there.

| had no doubt that they would murder me in a second if |
did not move away from the corpse. As | did so, an idiotically
frightened part of my mind noted that the Three Score and
Ten were now the Three Score and Nine. It seemed funny at
the time.

The Bikura lifted the body and moved back toward the
village.

Beta looked at the sky, looked at me, and said:

“It is almost time. You will come.”

We went down into the Cleft. The body was carefully tied
into a basket of vines and lowered with us.

The sun was not yet illuminating the interior of the
basilica when they set Alpha’s corpse on the broad altar and
removed his remaining rags.

| do not know what | expected next—some ritual act of
cannibalism perhaps. Nothing would have surprised me.
Instead, one of the Bikura raised his arms, just as the first
Shafts of colored light entered the basilica, and intoned, “You
will follow the cross all of your days.”

The Three Score and Ten knelt and repeated the sentence.
| remained standing. | did not speak.

“You will be of the cruciform all of your days,” said the
little Bikura and the basilica echoed to the chorus of voices
repeating the phrase. Light the color and texture of clotting
blood threw a huge shadow of the cross on the far wall.

“You will be of the cruciform now and forever and ever,”
came the chant as the winds rose outside and the organ
pipes of the canyon wailed with the voice of a tortured child.

When the Bikura stopped chanting | did not whisper
“Amen.” | stood there while the others turned and left with
the sudden, total indifference of spoiled children who have
lost interest in their game.

“There is no reason to stay,” said Beta when the others
had gone.

“I want to,” | said, expecting a command to leave. Beta
turned without so much as a shrug and left me there. The

light dimmed. | went outside to watch the sun set and when
| returned it had begun.

Once, years ago in school, | saw a time-lapse holo showing
the decomposition of a kangaroo mouse. A week’s slow work
of nature’s recycling had been accelerated to thirty seconds
of horror. There was the sudden, almost comic bloating of
the little corpse, then the stretching of flesh into lesions,
followed by the sudden appearance of maggots in the
mouth, eyes, and open sores, and finally the sudden and
incredible corkscrew cleaning of meat from the bones—there
is no other phrase that fits the image—as the pack of
maggots spiraled right to left, head to tail, in a time-lapsed
helix of carrion consumption that left behind nothing but
bones and gristle and hide.

Now it was a man’s body | watched.

| stopped and stared, the last of the light fading quickly.
There was no sound in the echoing silence of the basilica
except for the pounding of my pulse in my own ears. | stared
as Alpha’s corpse first twitched and then visibly vibrated,
almost levitating off the altar in the spastic violence of
sudden decomposition. For a few seconds the cruciform
seemed to increase in size and deepen in color, glowing as
red as raw meat, and | imagined then that | caught a
glimpse of the network of filaments and nematodes holding
the disintegrating body together like metal fibers in a
sculptor’s melting model. The flesh flowed.

| stayed in the basilica that night. The area around the
altar remained lit by the glow of the cruciform on Alpha’s
chest. When the corpse moved the light would cast strange
shadows on the walls.

| did not leave the basilica until Alpha left on the third
day, but most of the visible changes had taken place by the
end of that first night. The body of the Bikura | had named
Alpha was broken down and rebuilt as | watched. The corpse
that was left was not quite Alpha and not quite not Alpha,
but it was intact. The face was a flowfoam doll’s face,

smooth and unlined, features stamped in a slight smile. At
sunrise of the third day, | saw the corpse’s chest begin to
rise and fall and | heard the first intake of breath—a rasp like
water being poured into a leather pouch. Shortly before
noon | left the basilica to climb the vines.

| followed Alpha.

He has not spoken, will not reply. His eyes have a fixed,
unfocused look and occasionally he pauses as if he hears
distant voices calling.

No one paid attention to us when we returned to the
village. Aloha went to a hut and sits there now. | sit in mine.
A minute ago | opened my robe and ran my fingers across
the welt of the cruciform. It lies benignly under the flesh of
my chest. Waiting.

Day 140:

| am recovering from my wounds and the loss of blood. It
cannot be cut out with a sharpened stone.

It does not like pain. I lost consciousness long before the
pain or loss of blood demanded it. Each time | awoke and
resumed cutting, | would be made to pass out. It does not
like pain.

Day 158:

Alpha speaks some now. He seems duller, slower, and only
vaguely aware of me (or anyone else) but he eats and
moves. He appears to recognize me to some extent. The
medscanner shows the heart and internal organs of a young
man—perhaps of a boy of sixteen.

| must wait about another Hyperion month and ten days—
about fifty days in all—until the flame forests become quiet
enough for me to try to walk out, pain or no pain. We will see
who can stand the most pain.

Day 173:

Another death.

The one called Will—the one with the broken finger—had
been missing for a week. Yesterday the Bikura went several
kilometers northeast as if following a beacon, and found the
remains near the great ravine.

Evidently a branch had snapped while he was climbing to
grasp some chalma fronds. Death must have been
instantaneous when he broke his neck, but it is where he fell
that is important. The body—if one could call it that—was
lying between two great mud cones marking the burrows of
the large red insects that Tuk called fire mantises. Carpet
beetles might have been a more apt phrase. In the past few
days the insects had stripped the corpse clean to the bone.
Little was left to be found except the skeleton, some random
shreds of tissue and tendon, and the cruciform—still
attached to the rib cage like some splendid cross packed in
the sarcophagus of a long-dead pope.

It is terrible, but | cannot help but feel some small sense of
triumph beneath the sadness. There is no way that the
cruciform can regenerate something out of these bare
bones; even the terrible illogic of this accursed parasite
must respect the imperative of the law of conservation of
mass. The Bikura | called Will has died the true death. The
Three Score and Ten truly are the Three Score and Nine from
this time on.

Day 174:

lam a fool.

Today | inquired about Will, about his dying the true
death. | was curious at the lack of reaction from the Bikura.
They had retrieved the cruciform but left the skeleton lying
where they had found it; there was no attempt to carry the
remains to the basilica. During the night | had become

concerned that | would be made to fill the roll of the missing
member of the Three Score and Ten. “It is very sad,” | said,
“that one of you has died the true death. What is to become
of the Three Score and Ten?”

Beta stared at me. “He cannot die the true death,” said the
bald little androgyny. “He is of the cruciform.”

Somewhat later, while continuing my medscans of the
tribe, | discovered the truth. The one I have tagged as Theta
looks the same and acts the same, but now carries two
cruciforms embedded in his flesh. | have no doubt that this
is one Bikura who will tend toward corpulence in coming
years, swelling and ripening like some obscene E. coli cell in
a petri dish. When he/she/it dies, two will leave the tomb
and the Three Score and Ten will be complete once more.

| believe |I am going mad.

Day 195:

Weeks of studying the damn parasite and still no clue as
to how it functions. Worse, | no longer care. What | care
about now is more important.

Why has God allowed this obscenity?

Why have the Bikura been punished this way?

Why was | chosen to suffer their fate?

| ask these questions in nightly prayers but | hear no
answers, only the blood song of the wind from the Cleft.

Day 214:

The last ten pages should have covered all of my field
notes and technical conjectures. This will be my last entry
before attempting the quiescent flame forest in the morning.

There is no doubt that | have discovered the ultimate in
stagnant human societies. The Bikura have realized the
human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their
humanity and their immortal souls.

Edouard, | have spent so many hours wrestling with my
faith—my lack of faith—but now, in this fearful corner of an
all but forgotten world, riddled as | am with this loathsome
parasite, | have somehow rediscovered a strength of belief
the likes of which | have not known since you and | were
boys. | now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-
in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the
wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws
and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that
inhabit it.

Day after day | have tried to leave the Cleft area and day
after day | have suffered pain so terrible that it has become
a tangible part of my world, like the too small sun or the
green and lapis sky. Pain has become my ally, my guardian
angel, my remaining link with humanity. The cruciform does
not like pain. Nor do | but, like the cruciform, | am willing to
use it to serve my purposes. And | will do so consciously, not
instinctively like the mindless mass of alien tissue
embedded in me. This thing only seeks a mindless
avoidance of death by any means. | do not wish to die, but |
welcome pain and death rather than an eternity of mindless
life. Life is sacred—I still hold to that as a core element of the
Church’s thought and teachings these past twenty-eight
hundred years when life has been so cheap—but even more
sacred is the soul.

| realize now that what | was trying to do with the
Armaghast data was offer the Church not a rebirth but only a
transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses
inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so—but do
so gloriously, in the full knowledge of its rebirth in Christ. It
must go into the darkness not willingly but well—bravely
and firm of faith—like the millions who have gone before us,
keeping faith with all those generations facing death in the
isolated silence of death camps and nuclear fireballs and
cancer wards and pogroms, going into the darkness, if not
hopefully, then prayerfully that there is some reason for it

all, something worth the price of all that pain, all those
sacrifices. All those before us have gone into the darkness
without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with
only a slender thread of hope or the all too shakable
conviction of faith. And if they have been able to sustain
that slim hope in the face of darkness, then so must |... and
so must the Church.

| no longer believe that any surgery or treatment can cure
me of this thing that infests me, but if someone can separate
it and study it and destroy it, even at the cost of my death, |
will be well satisfied.

The flame forests are as quiet as they will ever be. To bed
now. | leave before dawn.

Day 215:

There is no way out.

Fourteen kilometers into the forest. Stray fires and bursts
of current, but penetrable. Three weeks of walking would
have got me through.

The cruciform will not let me go.

The pain was like a heart attack that would not stop. Still |
staggered forward, stumbling and crawling through the ash.
Eventually | lost consciousness. When | came to | was
crawling toward the Cleft. | would turn away, walk a
kilometer, crawl fifty meters, then lose consciousness again
and awake back where | had started. All day this insane
battle for my body went on.

Before sunset the Bikura entered the forest, found me five
kilometers from the Cleft, and carried me back.

Dear Jesus, why have you let this be?

There is no hope now unless someone comes looking for
me.

Day 223:

Again the attempt. Again the pain. Again the failure.

Day 257:

| am sixty-eight standard years old today. Work goes on
with the chapel | am building near the Cleft. Attempted to
descend to the river yesterday but was turned back by Beta
and four others.

Day 280:

One local year on Hyperion. One year in purgatory. Or is it
hell?

Day 311:

Working on quarrying stones on the ledges below the shelf
where the chapel is going up and | made the discovery
today: the arrestor rods. The Bikura must have thrown them
over the edge when they murdered Tuk that night two
hundred and twenty-three days ago.

These rods would allow me to penetrate the flame forest at
any time if the cruciform would allow it. But it will not. If only
they had not destroyed my medkits with the painkillers! But
still, sitting here holding the rods today, | have an idea.

My crude experiments with the medscanner have
continued. Two weeks ago when Theta broke his leg in three
places, | observed the reaction of the cruciform. The parasite
did its best to block the pain; Theta was unconscious much
of the time and his body was producing incredible quantities
of endorphins. But the break was a very painful one and
after four days die Bikura slashed Theta’s throat and took his
body to the basilica. It was easier for the cruciform to
resurrect his corpse than to tolerate such pain over a long
period. But before his murder my scanner showed an

appreciable retreat of the cruciform nematodes from some
parts of the central nervous system.

| do not know if it would be possible to inflict on oneself—
or to tolerate—levels of nonlethal pain sufficient to drive the
cruciform out completely, but | am sure of one thing: the
Bikura would not allow it.

Today | sit on the ledge below the half-finished chapel and
| consider possibilities.

Tonight, when the Bikura went down into the Cleft for their
daily parody of worship, | said Mass at the altar of the newly
erected chapel. | had baked the bread from chalma flour and
| am sure that it must have tasted of that bland, yellow leaf,
but to me the taste was exactly like that of the first Host |
had partaken of during my first Holy Communion in
Villefranche-sur-Sadne some sixty standard years earlier.

In the morning | will do what | have planned. Everything is
in readiness: my journals and the medscan wafers will be in
the pouch of woven bestos fibers. That is the best | can do.

The consecrated wine was only water, but in the dim light
of sunset it looked blood red and tasted of Communion wine.

The trick will be to penetrate deep enough into the flame
forest. | will have to trust that there is enough incipient
activity in and from the tesla trees even during the quiet
periods.

Goodbye, Edouard. | doubt if you are still alive, and should
you be, | see no way that we could ever be reunited,
separated as we are not only by years of distance but by a
much wider gulf in the form of a cross. My hope of seeing
you again shall not be placed on this life but on the one to
come. Strange to hear me speak like this again, is it not? |
must tell you, Edouard, that after all these decades of

uncertainty, and with great fear of what lies ahead, my heart
and soul are nonetheless at peace.

Oh, my God,

| am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,
And I detest all my sins,

Because of the loss of heaven

And the pains of hell,

But most of all because | have offended Thee,
My God,

Who art all good

And deserving of all my love.

| firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do
penance,

And to amend my life,
Amen.

2400 hours:

The sunset comes through the open chapel window and
bathes the altar, the crudely carved chalice, and me in light.
The wind from the Cleft rises in the last such chorus that—
with luck and God’s mercy—|I will ever hear.

“That is the final entry,” said Lenar Hoyt.

When the priest quit reading, the six pilgrims at the table
raised their faces toward him as if they were awakening from
a common dream. The Consul glanced upward and saw that
Hyperion was much closer now, filling a third of the sky,
banishing the stars with its cold radiance.

“| arrived some ten weeks after | had last seen Father
Duré,” continued Father Hoyt. His voice was a hoarse rasp.
“More than eight years had passed on Hyperion ... seven
years since the last entry in Father Duré’s journal.” The
priest was visibly in pain now, his face paled to a sick
luminescence and filmed with perspiration.

“Within a month | found my way to Perecebo Plantation
upriver from Port Romance,” he continued, forcing some
strength into his voice. “My assumption was that the
fiberplastic growers might tell me the truth even if they
would have nothing to do with the consulate or Home Rule
Authorities. | was right. The administrator at Perecebo, a
man named Orlandi, remembered Father Duré, as did
Orlandi’s new wife, the woman named Semfa whom Father
Duré mentioned in his journals. The plantation manager had
tried to mount several rescue operations onto the Plateau,
but an unprecedented series of active seasons in the flame
forests had made them abandon their attempts. After
several years they had given up hope that Duré or their man
Tuk could still be alive.

“Nonetheless, Orlandi recruited two expert bush pilots to
fly a rescue expedition up the Cleft in two plantation
Skimmers. We stayed in the Cleft itself for as long as we
could, trusting to terrain-avoidance instruments and luck to
get us to Bikura country. Even with by-passing most of the
flame forest that way, we lost one of the skimmers and four
people to tesla activity.”

Father Hoyt paused and swayed slightly. Gripping the
edge of the table to steady himself, he cleared his throat
and said, “There’s little else to tell. We located the Bikura
village. There were seventy of them, each as stupid and
uncommunicative as Duré’s notes had suggested. | managed
to ascertain from them that Father Duré had died while
trying to penetrate the flame forest. The bestos pouch had
survived and in it we found his journals and medical data.”
Hoyt looked at the others a second and then glanced down.
“We persuaded them to show us where Father Duré had
died,” he said. “They ... ah ... they had not buried him. His
remains were badly burned and decomposed but complete
enough to show us that the intensity of the tesla charges
had destroyed the ... the cruciform ... as well as his body.

“Father Duré had died the true death. We returned the
remains to the Perecebo Plantation where he was buried
following a full funeral Mass.” Hoyt took a deep breath.
“Over my strong objections, M. Orlandi destroyed the Bikura
village and a section of the Cleft wail with shaped nuclear
charges he had brought from the plantation. | do not believe
that any of the Bikura could have survived. As far as we
could tell, the entrance to the labyrinth and the so-called
basilica also must have been destroyed in the landslide.

“| had sustained several injuries during the expedition and
thus had to remain at the plantation for several months
before returning to the northern continent and booking
passage to Pacem. No one knows of these journals or their
contents except M. Orlandi, Monsignor Edouard, and
whichever of his superiors Monsignor Edouard chose to tell.
As far as | know, the Church has issued no declaration
relating to the journals of Father Paul Durée.”

Father Hoyt had been standing and now he sat. Sweat
dripped from his chin and his face was blue-white in the
reflected light of Hyperion.

“Is that ... all?” asked Martin Silenus.

“Yes,” managed Father Hoyt.

“Gentlemen and lady,” said Het Masteen, “it is late. |
suggest that you gather your luggage and rendezvous at our
friend the Consul’s ship on sphere 11 in thirty minutes or
sooner. | will be using one of the tree’s dropships to join you
later.”

Most of the group was assembled in less than fifteen
minutes. The Templars had rigged a gangway from a work
pier on the interior of the sphere to the ship’s top-tier
balcony, and the Consul led the way into the lounge as crew
clones stowed luggage and departed.

“A fascinating old instrument,” said Colonel Kassad as he
ran one hand across the top of the Steinway. “Harpsichord?”

“Piano,” said the Consul. “Pre-Hegira. Are we all here?”

“Everyone except Hoyt,” said Brawne Lamia as she took a
seat in the projection pit.

Het Masteen entered. “The Hegemony warship has
granted permission for you to descend to Keats’s spaceport,”
said the Captain. He glanced around. “I will send a crew
member to see if M. Hoyt needs assistance.”

“No,” said the Consul. He modulated his voice. “I’d like to
get him. Can you tell me the way to his quarters?”

The treeship Captain looked at the Consul for a long
second and then reached into the folds of his robe. “Bon
voyage,” he said, handing over a wafer. “I will see you on the
planet, sometime before our midnight departure time from
the Shrike’s Temple in Keats.”

The Consul bowed. “It was a pleasure traveling within the
protective branches of the Tree, Het Masteen,” he said
formally. Turning to the others, he gestured. “Please make
yourselves comfortable in the lounge or the library on the
deck below this. The ship will see to your needs and answer
any questions you might have. We will depart as soon as
Father Hoyt and | return.”

The priest’s environment pod was halfway up the treeship,
far out on a secondary branch. As the Consul expected, the
comlog direction wafer Het Masteen had given him also
served as a palmlock override. After useless minutes tapping
the announcer chime and pounding on the access portal,
the Consul triggered the override and stepped into the pod.

Father Hoyt was on his knees, writhing in the center of the
grass carpet. Bedclothes, gear, garments, and the contents
of a standard medkit were strewn on the floor around him.
He had torn off his tunic and collar and sweated through his
shirt so that it now hung in damp folds, ripped and tattered
where he had clawed through the fabric. Hyperion light
seeped through the pod wall, making the bizarre tableau

appear to be staged underwater—or, thought the Consul, in
a cathedral.

Lenar Hoyt’s face contorted in agony as his hands raked at
his chest. Muscles on his exposed forearms writhed like
living creatures moving beneath his pale tarp of a skin. “The
injector ... malfunctioned” gasped Hoyt. “Please.”

The Consul nodded, commanded the door to close, and
knelt next to the priest. He removed the useless injector
from Hoyt’s clenched fist and ejected the syrette ampule.
Ultramorphine. The Consul nodded again and took out an
injector from the medkit he had brought from his ship. It
took less than five seconds to load the ultramorph.

“Please” begged Hoyt. His whole body spasmed. The
Consul could almost see the waves of pain passing through
the man.

“Yes,” said the Consul. He took a ragged breath. “But first
the rest of the story.”

Hoyt stared, reached weakly for the injector.

Sweating himself now, the Consul held the instrument just
out of reach. “Yes, in a second,” he said. “After the rest of the
story. It’s important that | Know.”

“Oh, God, sweet Christ,” sobbed Hoyt. “Please!”

“Yes,” gasped the Consul. “Yes. As soon as you tell me the
truth.”

Father Hoyt collapsed onto his forearms, breathing in
quick pants. “You fucking bastard,” he gasped. The priest
took several deep breaths, held one until his body quit
Shaking, and tried to sit up. When he looked at the Consul,
there was something like relief in the maddened eyes.
“Then ... you'll give me... the shot?”

“Yes,” said the Consul.

“All right,” Hoyt managed in a sour whisper. “The truth.
Perecebo Plantation ... like | said. We flew in ... early
October ... Lycius ... eight years after Duré ... disappeared.
Oh, Christ, it hurts! Alcohol and endos don’t work at all
anymore. Only ... pure ultramorph ...”

“Yes,” whispered the Consul. “It’s ready. AS soon as the
story is done.”

The priest lowered his head. Sweat dripped from his
cheeks and nose onto the short grass. The Consul saw the
man’s muscles tense as if he were going to attack, then
another spasm of pain wracked the thin body and Hoyt
sagged forward. “Skimmer wasn’t destroyed ... by tesla.
Semfa, two men, and | ... forced down near the Cleft
while ... while Orlandi searched upriver. His skimmer ... had
to wait while the lightning storm died down.

“Bikura came in the night. Killed ... killed Semfa, the pilot,
the other man ... forget his name. Left me ... alive.” Hoyt
reached for his crucifix, realized that he had torn it off. He
laughed briefly, stopping before the laughter turned to sobs.
“They ... told me about the way of the cross. About the
cruciform. Told me about ... the Son of the Flames.

“Next morning, they took me to see the Son. Took me... to
see him.” Hoyt struggled upright and clawed at his own
cheeks. His eyes were wide, the ultramorph obviously
forgotten despite the pain. “About three kilometers into the
flame forest ... big tesla ... eighty, a hundred meters tall, at
least. Quiet then, but still a lot ... a lot of charge in the air.
Ash everywhere.

“The Bikura wouldn’t ... wouldn’t go too close. Just knelt
there with their goddamned bald heads bowed. But I ... went
close ... had to. Dear God ... Oh, Christ, it was him. Duré.
What was /eft of him.

“He’d used a ladder to get three ... maybe four
meters ... up on the bole of the tree. Built a sort of platform.
For his feet. Broken the arrestor rods off ... little more than

spikes ... then sharpened them. Must’ve used a rock to drive
the long one through his feet into the bestos platform and
tree.

“His left arm ... he’d pounded the stake between the
radius and ulna ... missed veins ... just like the goddamned
Romans. Very secure as long as his skeleton was intact.

Other hand ... right hand ... palm down. He’d driven the
spike first. Sharpened both ends. Then ... impaled his right
hand. Somehow bent the spike over. Hook.

“Ladder’d fallen ... long ago ... but it was bestos. Hadn’t
burned. Used it to climb up to him. Everything’d burned
away years ago ... clothes, skin, top layers of flesh ... but the
bestos pouch was still around his neck.

“The alloy spikes still conducted current even when ... |
could see it... feel it ... surging through what was left of the
body.

“It still looked like Paul Duré. Important. | told Monsignor.
No skin. Flesh raw or boiled away. Nerves and things
visible ... like gray and yellow roots. Christ, the smell. But it
still looked like Paul Duré!

“I understood then. Understood it all. Somehow ... even
before reading the journals. Understood he’d been hanging
there ... oh, dear God ... seven years. Living. Dying. The
cruciform ... forcing him to live again. Electricity ... surging
through him every second of those ... those seven years.
Flames. Hunger. Pain. Death. But somehow the
goddamned ... cruciform ... leeching substance from the tree
maybe, the air, what was left ... rebuilding what it
could ... forcing it to /ive, to feel the pain, over and over and
over...

“But he won. Pain was his ally. Oh, Jesus, not a few hours
on the tree and then the spear and Test, but seven years!

“But ... he won. When | removed the pouch, the cruciform
on his chest fell away also. Just ... fell right off ... long,
bloody roots. Then the thing ... the thing I’d been sure was a
corpse ... the man raised its head. No eyelids. Eyes baked
white. Lips gone. But it looked at me and smiled. He smiled.
And he died ... really died ... there in my arms. The ten
thousandth time, but rea/ this time. He smiled at me and
died.”

Hoyt stopped, communed in silence with his own pain, and
then continued between bouts of clenching his teeth.

“Bikura took me ... back to ... Cleft. Orlandi came the next
day. Rescued me. He ... Semfa ... | couldn’t ... he lasered the
village, burned the Bikura where they stood like stupid
sheep. | didn’t ... didn’t argue with him. | /aughed. Dear God,
forgive me. Orlandi nuked the site with shaped charges they
used to... to clear the jungle ... fiberplastic matrix.”

Hoyt looked directly at the Consul and made a contorted
gesture with his right hand. “The painkillers worked all right
at first. But every year ... every day ... got worse. Even in
fugue ... the pain. | would have had to come back anyway.
How could he ... seven years! Oil, Jesus,” said Father Hoyt
and clawed at the carpet.

The Consul moved quickly, injecting the full ampule of
ultramorph just under the armpit, catching the priest as he
collapsed, and gently lowering the unconscious form to the
floor. His vision unclear, the Consul ripped open Hoyt’s
sweat-sodden shirt, casting the rags aside. It was there, of
course, lying under the pale skin of Hoyt’s chest like some
great, raw, cross-shaped worm. The Consul took a breath and
gently turned the priest over. The second cruciform was
where he had expected to find it, a slightly smaller, cross-
Shaped welt between the thin man’s shoulder blades. It
stirred slightly as the Consul’s fingers brushed the fevered
flesh.

The Consul moved slowly but efficientlhy—packing the
priest’s belongings, straightening the room, dressing the
unconscious man with the gentle care one would use in
clothing the body of a dead family member.

The Consuls comlog buzzed. “We need to go,” came
Colonel Kassad’s voice.

“We're coming,” replied the Consul. He coded the comlog
to summon, crew clones to fetch the luggage, but lifted
Father Hoyt himself. The body seemed to weigh nothing.

The pod door dilated open and the Consul stepped out,
moving from the deep shadow of the branch into the blue-
green glow of the world which filled the sky. Deciding what

cover story he would tell the others, the Consul paused a
second to look at the sleeping man’s face. He glanced up at
Hyperion and then moved on. Even if the gravity field had
been full Earth standard, the Consul knew, the body in his
arms would have been no burden.

Once a parent to a child now dead, the Consul walked on,
knowing once again the sensation of bearing a sleeping son
to bed.

It had been a warm, rainy day in Keats, Hyperion’s capital,
and even after the rains stopped a layer of clouds moved
slow and heavy over the city, filling the air with the salt
scent of the ocean twenty kilometers to the west. Toward
evening, as the gray daylight was beginning to fade into
gray twilight, a double sonic boom shook the town and then
echoed from the single, sculpted peak to the south. The
clouds glowed blue-white. Half a minute later an ebony
Spacecraft broke through the overcast and descended
carefully on a tail of fusion flame, its navigation lights
blinking red and green against the gray.

At one thousand meters the craft’s landing beacons Flared
and three beams of coherent light from the spaceport north
of town locked the ship in a welcoming ruby tripod. The
Spacecraft hovered at three hundred meters, slipped
sideways as smoothly as a mug sliding on a wet table top,
and then settled weightlessly into a waiting blast pit.

High-pressure jets of water bathed the pit and the base of
the ship, sending up billows of steam to blend with the
curtains of drizzle blowing across the paved plain of the
Spaceport. When the water jets ceased there was no noise
except the whisper of rain and the random ticks and creaks
of the cooling spaceship.

A balcony extruded itself from the ships bulkhead twenty
meters above the pit wall. Five figures emerged. “Thank you
for the ride, sir,” Colonel Kassad said to the Consul.

The Consul nodded and leaned on the railing, taking in
deep breaths of fresh air. Droplets of rain beaded on his
shoulders and eyebrows.

Sol Weintraub lifted his baby from her infant carrier. Some
change in pressure, temperature, scent, motion, noise, or a
combination of all of these had awakened her and now she
began to cry lustily. Weintraub bounced her and cooed to
her but the wailing continued.

“An appropriate comment upon our arrival,” said Martin
Silenus. The poet wore a long purple cape and a red beret
which slouched to his right shoulder. He took a drink from a
wineglass he had carried out from the lounge. “Christ on a
stick, this place looks different.”

The Consul, who had been away only eight local years,
had to agree. The spaceport had been a full nine klicks from
the city when he lived in Keats; now shacks, tents, and mud
streets surrounded the landing field’s perimeter. In the
Consul’s day, no more than a ship a week had put in at the
tiny spaceport; now he counted more than twenty spacecraft
on the field. The small administration and customs building
had been superseded by a huge, prefabricated structure, a
dozen new blast pits and dropship grids had been added
where the field had been hastily extended to the west, and
the perimeter now was littered with scores of camouflage-
sheathed modules which the Consul knew must serve as
everything from ground control stations to barracks. A forest
of exotic antennae grew skyward from a cluster of such
boxes at the far end of the landing apron. “Progress,”
murmured the Consul.

“War,” said Colonel Kassad.

“Those are people,” said Brawne Lamia, pointing toward
the main terminal gates on the south side of the field. A
wave of drab colors crashed like a silent surf against the
outer fence and the violet containment field.

“My God,” said the Consul, “you're right.”

Kassad produced his binoculars and they took turns
staring at the thousands of forms tugging at the wire,
pressing against the repelling field.

“Why are they here?” asked Lamia. “What do they want?”
Even from half a kilometer away, the mindless will of the
mob was daunting. Dark forms of FORCE: Marines could be
seen patrolling just within the perimeter. The Consul realized
that between the wire, the containment field, and the
Marines a strip of raw earth almost surely signified mines or
a deathbeam zone, or both.

“What do they want?” repeated Lamia.

“They want out,” said Kassad.

Even before the Colonel spoke, the Consul realized that
the shack city around the spaceport and the mob at the
gates were inevitable; the people of Hyperion were ready to
leave. He guessed that there must be such a silent surge
toward the gates each time a ship landed.

“Well, there’s one who'll be staying,” said Martin Silenus
and pointed toward the low mountain across the river to the
south. “Old Weeping William Rex, God rest his sinful soul.”
The sculpted face of Sad King Billy was just visible through
the light rain and growing darkness. “I knew him, Horatio,”
said the drunken poet. “A man of infinite jest. Not one of
them funny. A real horse’s ass, Horatio.”

Sol Weintraub stood just inside the ship, shielding his
baby from the drizzle and removing her cries from the
vicinity of the conversation. He pointed. “Someone is
coming.”

A groundcar with its camouflage polymer inert and a
military EMV modified with hoverfans for Hyperion’s weak
magnetic field were crossing the damp hardpan.

Martin Silenus’s gaze never left Sad King Billy’s dour
visage. Silenus said in a voice almost too soft to be heard:

“Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;

Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud....”

Father Hoyt came onto the balcony, rubbing his face with
both hands. His eyes were wide and unfocused, a child rising
from his nap. “Are we there?” he asked.

“Fucking aye,” cried Martin Silenus, returning the
binoculars to the Colonel. “Lets go down and greet the
gendarmes.”

The young Marine lieutenant seemed unimpressed with
the group even after he had scanned the authorization wafer
Het Masteen had passed along from the task force
commander. The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa
chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making a
comment with the idle arrogance common to such nobodies
who have just come into a small bit of power. Then he came
to Fedmahn Kassad’s chip and looked up with the expression
of a startled stoat. “Colonel Kassad!”

“Retired,” said Kassad.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the lieutenant, stumbling over his
words as he fumbled the visas back to everyone. “I had no
idea you were with this party, sir. That is ... the Captain just
said ... | mean ... my uncle was with you on Bressia, sir. |
mean, I’m sorry ... anything | or my men can do to...”

“At ease, Lieutenant,” said Kassad. “Is there any chance of
getting some transport into the city?”

“Ah ... well, sir...” The young Marine started to rub his
chin and then remembered that he was wearing his helmet.
“Yes, sir. But the problem is, sir, the mobs can get pretty
nasty and ... well, the damn EMVs don’t work for shit on
this ... uh, pardon me, sir. You see, the ground transports’re
limited to cargo and we don’t have any skimmers free to
leave the base until 2200 hours but l'Il be happy to get your
party on the roster for ...”

“Just a minute,” said the Consul. A battered passenger
skimmer with the gold geodesic of the Hegemony painted
on one flare skirt had landed ten meters away. A tall, thin
man stepped out. “Theo!” cried the Consul.

The two men stepped forward, started to shake hands, and
then hugged each other instead. “Damn,” said the Consul,
“you look good, Theo.” It was true. His former aide had
gained half a dozen years on the Consul, but the younger
man still had the boyish smile, thin face, and thick red hair
that had attracted every unmarried woman—and not a few
married ones—on the consulate staff. The shyness which
had been part of Theo Lane’s vulnerability was still there, as
evidenced by the way he now needlessly adjusted his
archaic horn-rimmed glasses—the young diplomat’s one
affectation.

“It’s good to have you back,” said Theo.

The Consul turned, started to introduce his friend to the
group, and then stopped. “My God,” he said, “you’re Consul
now. I’m sorry, Theo, | wasn’t thinking.”

Theo Lane smiled and adjusted his glasses. “No problem,
sir,” he said. “Actually, I’m no longer Consul. For the last few
months I’ve been acting Governor-General. The Home Rule
Council finally requested—and received—formal colonial
status. Welcome to the newest world in the Hegemony.”

The Consul stared a second and then hugged his former
protege again. “Congratulations, Your Excellency.”

Theo grinned and glanced at the sky. “It’s going to rain in
earnest before long. Why don’t we get your group aboard
the skimmer and I'll drive you into town” The new Governor-
General smiled at the young Marine. “Lieutenant?”

“Uh ... yes, sir?” The officer had snapped to attention.

“Could you get your men to load these good people’s
luggage, please? We’d all like to get in out of the rain.”

The skimmer flew south above the highway at a steady sixty
meters. The Consul rode in the front passenger seat; the rest
of the group relaxed in flowfoam recliners behind. Martin
Silenus and Father Hoyt appeared to be asleep. Weintraub’s
baby had ceased crying in favor of nursing on a soft bottle of
synthesized mother’s milk.

“Things have changed,” said the Consul. He rested his
cheek against the rain-spattered canopy and looked down’
at the chaos.

Thousands of shacks and lean-tos covered the hillsides
and gullies along the three-klick ride to the suburbs. Fires
were being lighted under wet tarps and the Consul watched
mud-colored figures moving between mud-colored shacks.
High fences had been rigged along the old Spaceport
Highway and the road itself had been widened and
regraded. Two lanes of truck and hover traffic, most of it
military green or shrouded with inactive camouflage
polymer, moved sluggishly in both directions. Ahead, the
lights of Keats seemed to have multiplied and spread across
new sections of the river valley and hills.

“Three million,” said Theo, as if reading his former boss’s
mind.

“At least three million people and growing every day.”

The Consul stared. “There were only four and a half million
people on the planet when | left.”

“Still are,” said the new Governor-General. “And every one
of them wants to get to Keats, board a ship, and get the hell
out. Some are waiting forlhe farcaster to be built, but most
don’t believe it'll happen in time. They’re afraid.”

“Of the Ousters?”

“Them too,” said Theo, “but mostly of the Shrike.”

The Consul turned his face from the coolness of the
canopy. “It’s come south of the Bridle Range then?”

Theo laughed without humor. “It’s everywhere. Or they’re
everywhere. Most people are convinced that there are

dozens or hundreds of the things now. Shrike deaths have
been reported on all three continents. Everywhere except
Keats, segments of the coast along the Mane, and a few of
the big cities like Endymion.”

“How many casualties?” The Consul did not really want to
know.

“At least twenty thousand dead or missing,” said Theo.
“There are a lot of injured people but that isn’t the Shrike, is
it?” Again came the dry laugh. “The Shrike doesn’t just
wound people, does it? Uh-uh, people shoot each other by
accident, fall down stairways or jump out windows in their
panic, and trample each other in crowds. It’s a fucking
mess.”

In the eleven years the Consul had worked with Theo Lane,
he had never heard the younger man use profanity of any
sort. “Is FORCE any help?” the Consul asked. “Are they
what’s keeping the Shrike away from the big cities?”

Theo shook his head. “FORCE hasn’t done a damn thing
except control the mobs. Oh, the Marines put on a show of
keeping the spaceport open here and the harbor landing
zone at Port R. secure, but they haven't even tried to
confront the Shrike. They’re waiting to fight the Ousters.”

“SDF?” asked the Consul, knowing even as he spoke that
the poorly trained Self-defense Force would have been of
little use.

Theo snorted. “At least eight thousand of the casualties
are SDF. General Braxton took the ‘Fighting Third’ up the
River Road to ‘strike at the Shrike menace in their lair’ and
that was the last we heard of them.”

“You're joking,” said the Consul, but one look at his
friend’s face told him that he wasn’t. “Theo,”, he said, “how
in the world did you have time to meet us at the spaceport?”

“| didn’t,” said the Governor-General. He glanced in the
back. The others were sleeping or staring exhaustedly out
windows. “I needed to talk to you,” said Theo. “Convince you
not to go.”

The Consul started to shake his head but Theo grasped his
arm, squeezed hard. “Now listen to what I have to say, damn
it. | know how hard it is for you to come back here
after ... what happened but, goddamn it, there’s no sense in
your throwing everything away for no reason. Abandon this
stupid pilgrimage. Stay in Keats.”

“I can’t ...” began the Consul.

“Listen to me,” demanded Theo. “Reason one: you’re the
finest diplomat and crisis manager I’ve ever seen and we
need your skills.”

“It doesn’t ...”

“Shut up a minute. Reason two: you and the others won’t
get within two hundred klicks of the Time Tombs. This isn’t
like the old days when you were here and the goddamned
suicides could get up there and even sit around for a week
and maybe even change their minds and come home. The
Shrike is on the move. It’s like a plague.”

“| understand that but ...”

“Reason three: / need you. | begged Tau Ceti Center to
send someone else out. When | found that you were
poroipg ... well, hell, it got me through the last two years.”

The Consul shook his head, not understanding.

Theo started the turn toward the city center and then
hovered, taking his eyes off the controls to look directly at
the Consul. “I want you to take over the governor-
generalship. The Senate won’t interfere—except perhaps for
Gladstone—and by the time she finds out, it will be too
late.”

The Consul felt as though someone had struck him below
the third rib. He looked away, down at the maze of narrow
streets and crooked buildings that was Jacktown, the Old
City. When he could speak again, he said, “I can’t, Theo.”

“Listen, if you...”

“No. | mean I cannot. It would be no good if | did accept it,
but the simple truth is, | can’t. | have to go on this
pilgrimage.”

Theo straightened his glasses, stared straight ahead.

“Look, Theo, you’re the most competent and capable
Foreign Service professional I’ve ever worked with. I’ve been
out of things for eight years. I think ...”

Theo nodded tersely, interrupted. “I suppose you want to
go to the Shrike Temple.”

“Yes.”

The skimmer circled and settled. The Consul was staring at
nothing, thinking, when the side doors of the skimmer raised
and folded and Sol Weintraub said, “Good God.”

The group stepped out and stared at the charred and
toppled wreckage of what had been the Shrike Temple. Since
the Time Tombs had been closed as too dangerous some
twenty-five local years earlier, the Shrike Temple had
become Hyperion’s most popular tourist attraction. Filling
three full city blocks, rising more than a hundred and fifty
meters to its central, sharpened spire, the Shrike Church’s
central temple was part awe-inspiring cathedral, part Gothic
joke with its fluid, buttressed curves of stone permabonded
to its whiskered-alloy skeleton, part Escher print with its
tricks of perspective and impossible angles, part Boschian
nightmare with its tunnel entrances, hidden chambers, dark
gardens, and forbidden sections, and—more than anything
else—it had been part of Hyperion’s past.

Now it was gone. Tall heaps of blackened stone were the
only hint of the structure’s former majesty. Melted alloy
girders rose from the stones like the ribs of some giant
carcass. Much of the rubble had tumbled into the pits,
basements, and passages which had lain beneath the three-
century-old landmark. The Consul walked close to the edge
of a pit and wondered if the deep basements had—as legend
decreed—actually connected to one of the planet’s
labyrinths.

“It looks as if they used a hellwhip on this place,” said
Martin Silenus, using an archaic term for any high-energy
laser weapon. The poet seemed suddenly sobered as he

joined the Consul at the edge of the pit. “I remember when
the Temple and parts of the Old City were the only things
here,” he said. “After the disaster near the Tombs, Billy
decided to relocate Jacktown here because of the Temple.
Now it’s gone. Christ.”

“No,” said Kassad.

The others looked at him.

The Colonel rose from where he had been examining the
rubble. “Not a hellwhip,” he said. “Shaped plasma charges.
Several of them.”

“Now do you want to stay here and go on this useless
pilgrimage?” asked Theo. “Come with me back to the
consulate.” He was speaking to the Consul but extending
the invitation to everyone.

The Consul turned away from the pit, looking at his former
aide but now seeing, for the first time, the Governor-General
of a besieged Hegemony world. “We can’t, Your Excellency,”
said the Consul. “At least | can’t. | won’t speak for the
others.”

The four men and the woman shook their heads. Silenus
and Kassad began unloading luggage. The rain returned as a
light mist falling out of the darkness. At that second the
Consul noticed the two FORCE attack skimmers hovering
above nearby rooftops. Darkness and chameleon-polymer
hulls had hidden them well, but the rain now revealed their
outlines. Of course, thought the Consul, the Governor-
General does not travel unescorted.

“Did the priests escape? Were there survivors when the
Temple was destroyed?” asked Brawne Lamia.

“Yes,” said Theo. The de facto dictator of five million
doomed souls removed his glasses and dried them on his!
Shirttail. “All of the Shrike Cult priests and acolytes escaped
through tunnels. The mob had been surrounding this place
for months. Their leader, a woman named Gammon from
somewhere east of the Sea of Grass, gave everyone in the
Temple plenty of warning before they set off the DL-20.”

“Where were the police?” asked the Consul. “The SDF?
FORCE?”

Theo Lane smiled and at that second he looked decades
older than the young man the Consul had known. “You folks
have been in transit for three years,” he said. “The universe
has changed. Shrike cultists are being burned out and
beaten up in the Web. You can imagine the attitude here.
The Keats police have been absorbed under the martial law |
declared fourteen months ago. They and the SDF watched
while the mob torched the Temple. So did |. There were half
a million people here tonight.”

Sol Weintraub stepped closer. “Do they know about us?
About this final pilgrimage?”

“If they did,” said Theo, “none of you would be alive. You’d
think they’d welcome anything that might appease the
Shrike, but the only thing the mob would notice is that you
were chosen by the Shrike Church. As it was, | had to
overrule my own Advisory Council. They were in favor of
destroying your ship before it reached the atmosphere.”

“Why did you?” asked the Consul. “Overrule them, |
mean.”

Theo sighed and adjusted his glasses. “Hyperion still
needs the Hegemony, and Gladstone still has the vote of
confidence of the All Thing, if not the Senate. And | still need
you.”

The Consul looked at the rubble of the Shrike Temple.

“This pilgrimage was over before you got here,” said
Governor-General Theo Lane. “Will you come back to the
consulate with me... at least in an advisory capacity?”

“I’m sorry,” said the Consul. “I can’t.”

Theo turned without a word, dropped into the skimmer,
and lifted off. His military escort followed as a blur in the
rain.

It was raining harder now. The group moved closer
together in the growing darkness. Weintraub had rigged a

makeshift hood over Rachel and the noise of the rain on
plastic made the baby cry.

“What now?” said the Consul, looking around at the night
and narrow streets. Their luggage lay heaped in a soggy
pile. The world smelled of ashes.

Martin Silenus grinned. “I know a bar.”

It turned out that the Consul also knew the bar; he had all
but lived in Cicero’s for most of his eleven-year assignment
on Hyperion.

Unlike most things in Keats, on Hyperion, Cicero’s was not
named after some piece of pre-Hegira literary trivia. Rumor
had it that the bar was named after a section of an Old Earth
city—some said Chicago, USA, others were sure it was
Calcutta, AlS—but only Stan Leweski, owner and great-
grandson of the founder, knew for sure, and Stan had never
revealed its secret. The bar itself had overflowed over the
century and a half of its existence from a walk-up loft in one
of Jacktown’s sagging older buildings along the Hoolie River
to nine levels in four sagging old buildings along the Hoolie.
The only consistent elements of decor at Cicero’s over the
decades were the low ceilings, thick smoke, and constant
background babble which offered a sense of privacy in the
midst of bustle.

There was no privacy this night. The Consul and the others
paused as they carried their gear through the Marsh Lane
entrance.

“Jesus wept,” muttered Martin Silenus.

Cicero’s looked as if it had been invaded by barbarian
hordes. Every chair was filled, every table occupied, mostly
by men, and the floors were littered with packs, weapons,
bedrolls, antiquated comm equipment, ration boxes, and all
of the other detritus of an army of refugees ... or perhaps a
refugee army. The heavy air of Cicero’s, which once had
been filled with the blended scent of broiling steaks, wine,

stim, ale, and T-free tobacco, was now laden with the
overlapping smells of Unwashed bodies, urine, and
hopelessness.

At that moment the huge form of Stan _ Leweski
materialized out of the gloom. The bar owner’s forearms
were as huge and heavy as ever, but his forehead had
advanced more than a few centimeters against the receding
tangle of black hair and there were more creases than the
Consul remembered around the dark eyes. Those eyes were
wide now as Leweski stared at the Consul. “Ghost,” he said.

“No.”

“You are not dead?”

“No.”

“By damn!” declared Stan Leweski and, grasping the
Consul by the upper arms, picked him up as easily as a man
would lift a five-year-old. “By damn! You are not dead. What
are you doing here?”

“Checking your liquor license,
down.”

Leweski carefully set the Consul down, tapped his
shoulders, and grinned. He looked at Martin Silenus and the
grin changed to a frown. “You look familiar but | have never
seen you before.”

“| knew your great-grandfather,” said Silenus. “Which
reminds me, do you have any of that pre-Hegira ale left? The
warm, British stuff that tastes like recycled moose piss. |
could never get enough of that.”

“Nothing left,” said Leweski. He pointed at the poet. “By
damn. Grandfather Jiri’s trunk. That old holo of the satyr in
the original Jacktown. Can it be?” He stared at Silenus and
then at the Consul, touching them both gingerly with a
massive forefinger. “Two ghosts.”

“Six tired people,” said the Consul. The baby began crying
again. “Seven. Do you have space for us?”

Leweski turned in a half circle, hands spread, palms up. “It
is all like this. No space left. No food. No wine.” He squinted

”

said the Consul. “Put me

at Martin Silenus. “No ale. Now we have become a big hotel
with no beds. The SDF bastards stay here without paying
and drink their own upcountiy rotgut and wait for the world
to end. That will happen soon enough, | think.”

The group was standing in what had once been the
entrance mezzanine. Their heaped luggage joined a riot of
gear already littering the floor. Small clusters of men
shouldered their way through the throng and cast appraising
glances at the newcomers—especially at Brawne Lamia. She
returned their stares with a flat, cold glare.

Stan Leweski looked at the Consul for a moment. “I have a
balcony table. Five of those SDF Death Commandos have
been parked there for a week, telling everyone and each
other how they are going to wipe out the Ouster Legions
with their bare hands. You want the table, | will throw the
teat-suckers out.”

“Yes,” said the Consul.

Leweski had turned to leave when Lamia stopped him with
a hand on his arm. “Would you like a little help?” she asked.

Stan Leweski shrugged, grinned. “I do not need it, but |
might like it. Come.”

They disappeared into the crowd.

The third-floor balcony had just enough room for the
splintered table and six chairs. Despite the insane crowding
on the main floors, stairs, and landings, no one had
challenged them for the space after Leweski and Lamia
threw the protesting Death Commandos over the railing and
into the river nine meters below. Somehow Leweski had
managed to send up a tankard of beer and a basket of bread
and cold beef.

The group ate in silence, obviously suffering more than
the usual amount of postfugue hunger, fatigue, and
depression. The darkness of the balcony was relieved only
by dim, reflected light from deeper within Cicero’s and by

the lanterns on passing river barges. Most of the buildings
along the Hoolie were dark but other city lights reflected
from low clouds. The Consul could make out the ruins of the
Shrike Temple half a kilometer upriver.

“Well,” said Father Hoyt, obviously recovered from the
heavy dose of ultramorph and teetering on the delicate
balance between pain and sedation, “what do we do next?”

When no one answered, the Consul closed his eyes. He
refused to take the lead in anything. Sitting on the balcony
at Cicero’s, it was all too easy to fall back into the rhythms of
a former life; he would drink until the early morning hours,
watch the predawn meteor showers as the clouds cleared,
and then stagger to his empty apartment near the market,
going into the consulate four hours later showered, shaved,
and seemingly human except for the blood in his eyes and
the jinsane ache in his skull. Trusting in Theo—quiet,
efficient Theo—to get him through the morning. Trusting in
luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at
Cicero’s to get him through the night. Trusting in the
unimportance of his posting to get him through life.

“You are all ready to leave for the pilgrimage?”

The Consul’s eyes snapped open. A hooded figure stood in
the doorway and for a second the Consul thought it was Het
Masteen, but then he realized that this man was much
shorter, his voice not accented with the stilted Templar
consonants.

“If you are ready, we must go,” said the dark figure.

“Who are you?” asked Brawne Lamia.

“Come quickly,” was the shadow’s only reply.

Fedmahn Kassad stood, bending to keep his head from
striking the ceiling, and detained the robed figure, flipping
back the man’s hood with a flick of his left hand.

“An android!” said Lenar Hoyt, staring at the man’s blue
skin and blue-on-blue eyes.

The Consul was less surprised. For more than a century it
had been illegal to own androids in the Hegemony, and none

had been biofactured for almost that long, but they were still
used for manual labor in remote parts of backwater,
noncolony worlds—worlds like Hyperion. The Shrike Temple
had used androids extensively, complying with the Church
of the Shrike doctrine which proclaimed that androids were
free from original sin, therefore spiritually superior to
humankind and—incidentally—exempt from the Shrike’s
terrible and inevitable retribution.

“You must come quickly,” whispered the android, setting
his hood in place.

“Are you from the Temple?” asked Lamia.

“Quiet!” snapped the android. He glanced into the hall,
turned back, and nodded. “We must hurry. Please follow
me.”

All of them stood and then hesitated. The Consul watched
as Kassad casually unsealed the long leather jacket he was
wearing. He caught the briefest glimpse of a deathwand
tucked in the Colonel’s belt. Normally the Consul would have
been appalled by even the thought of a deathwand nearby
—the slightest mistaken touch could purée every synapse
on the balcony—but at this moment he was oddly reassured
by the sight of it.

“Our luggage ...” began Weintraub.

“It has been seen to,” whispered the hooded man.
“Quickly now.”

The group followed the android down the stairs and into
the night, their movement as tired and passive as a sigh.

The Consul slept late. Half an hour after sunrise a
rectangle of light found its way between the porthole’s
shutters and fell across his pillow. The Consul rolled away
and did not wake. An hour after that there came a loud
clatter as the tired mantas which had pulled the barge all
night were released and fresh ones harnessed. The Consul
slept on. In the next hour the footsteps and cries of the crew

on the deck outside his stateroom grew louder and more
persistent, but it was the warning claxon below the locks at
Karla which finally brought him up out of his sleep.

Moving slowly in the druglike languor of fugue hangover,
the Consul bathed as best he could with only basin and
pump, dressed in loose cotton trousers, an old canvas shirt,
and foam-soled walking shoes, and found his way to the
mid-deck.

Breakfast had been set out on a long sideboard near a
weathered table which could be retracted into the deck
planking. An awning shaded the eating area and the
crimson and gold canvas snapped to the breeze of their
passage. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and bright, with
Hyperion’s sun making up in ferocity what it lacked in size.

M. Weintraub, Lamia, Kassad, and Silenus had been up for
some time. Lenar Hoyt and Het Masteen joined the group a
few minutes after the Consul arrived.

The Consul helped himself to toasted fish, fruit, and
orange juice at the buffet and then moved to the railing. The
water was wide here, at least a kilometer from shore to
shore, and its green and lapis sheen echoed the sky. At first
glance the Consul did not recognize the land on either side
of the river. To the east, periscope-bean paddies stretched
away into the haze of distance where the rising sun reflected
on a thousand flooded surfaces. A few indigenie huts were
visible at the junction of paddy dikes, thieir angled walls
made of bleached weirwood or golden halfoak. To the west,
the bottomland along the river was overgrown with low
tangles of gissen, womangrove root, and a flamboyant red
fern the Consul did not recognize, all growing around mud
marshes and miniature lagoons which stretched another
kilometer or so to bluffs where scrub ever-blues clung to any
bare spot between granite slabs.

For a second the Consul felt lost, disoriented on a world he
thought he knew well, but then he remembered the claxon

at the Karla Locks and realized that they had entered a
rarely used stretch of the Hoolie north of Doukhobor’s Copse.
The Consul had never seen this part of the river, having
always traveled on or flown above the Royal Transport Canal
which lay to the west of the bluffs. He could only surmise
that some danger or disturbance along the main route to the
Sea of Grass had sent them this back way along bypassed
stretches of the Hoolie. He guessed that they were about a
hundred and eighty kilometers northwest of Keats.

“It looks different in the daylight, doesn’t it?” said Father
Hoyt.

The Consul looked at the shore again, not sure what Hoyt
was talking about; then he realized the priest meant the
barge.

It had been strange—following the android messenger in
the rain, boarding the old barge, making their way through
its maze of tessellated rooms and passages, picking up Het
Masteen at the ruins of the Temple, and then watching the
lights of Keats fall astern.

The Consul remembered those hours before and after
midnight as from a fatigue-blurred dream, and he imagined
the others must have been just as exhausted and
disoriented. He vaguely remembered his surprise that the
barge’s crew were all android, but mostly he recalled his
relief at finally closing the door of his stateroom and
crawling into bed.

“| was talking to A. Bettik this morning,” said Weintraub,
referring to the android who had been their guide. “This old
scow has quite a history.”

Martin Silenus moved to the sideboard to pour himself
more tomato juice, added a dash of something from the flask
he carried, and said, “It’s obviously been around a bit. The
goddamn railings’ve been oiled by hands, the stairs worn by
feet, the ceilings darkened by lamp soot, and the beds
beaten saggy by generations of humping. I’d say it’s several
centuries old. The carvings and rococo finishes ate fucking

marvelous. Did you notice that tinder all the other scents
the inlaid wood still smells of sandalwood? | wouldn’t be
surprised if this thing came from Old Earth.”

“It does,” said Sol Weintraub. The baby, Rachel, slept on
his arm, softly blowing bubbles of saliva in her sleep. “We’re
on the proud ship Benares, built in and named after the Old
Earth city of the same name.”

“| don’t remember hearing of any Old Earth city with that
name,” said the Consul.

Brawne Lamia looked up from the last of her breakfast.
“Benares, also known as Varanasi or Gandhipur, Hindu Free
State. Part of the Second Asian Co-prosperity Sphere after
the Third Sino-Japanese War. Destroyed in the Indo-Soviet
Muslim Republic Limited Exchange.”

“Yes,” said Weintraub, “the Benares was built quite some
time before the Big Mistake. Mid-twenty-second century, |
would guess. A. Bettik informs me that it was originally a
levitation barge ...”

“Are the EM generators still down there?” interrupted
Colonel Kassad.

“I believe so,” said Weintraub. “Next to the main salon on
the lowest deck. The floor of the salon is clear lunar crystal.
Quite nice if we were cruising at two thousand
meters ... quite useless now.”

“Benares,” mused Martin Silenus. He ran his hand lovingly
across a time-darkened railing. “I was robbed there once.”

Brawne Lamia put down her coffee mug. “Old man, are
you trying to tell us that you’re ancient enough to remember
Old Earth? We're not fools, you know.”

“My dear child,” beamed Martin Silenus, “I am not trying
to tell you anything. | just thought it might be entertaining—
as well as edifying and enlightening—if at some point we
exchanged lists of all the locations at which we have either
robbed or been robbed. Since you have the unfair
advantage of having been the daughter of a senator, | am

sure that your list would be much more distinguished ... and
much longer.”

Lamia opened her mouth to retort, frowned, and said
nothing.

“I wonder how this ship got to Hyperion?” murmured
Father Hoyt. “Why bring a levitation barge to a world where
EM equipment doesn’t work?”

“It would work,” said Colonel Kassad. “Hyperion has some
magnetic field. It just would not be reliable in holding
anything airborne.”

Father Hoyt raised an eyebrow, obviously at a loss to see
the distinction.

“Hey,” cried the poet from his place at the railing, “the
gang’s all here!”

“So?” said Brawne Lamia. Her lips all but disappeared into
a thin line whenever she spoke to Silenus.

“So we're all here,” he said. “Let’s get on with the
storytelling.”

Het Masteen said, “I thought it had been agreed that we
would tell our respective stories after the dinner hour.”

Martin Silenus shrugged. “Breakfast, dinner, who the fuck
cares? We're assembled. It’s not going to take six or seven
days to get to the Time Tombs, is it?”

The Consul considered. Less than two days to get as far as
the river could take them. Two more days, or less if the winds
were right, on the Sea of Grass. Certainly no more than one
more day to cross the mountains. “No,” he said. “Not quite
Six days.”

“All right,” said Silenus, “then let’s get on with the telling
of tales. Besides, there’s no guarantee that the Shrike won’t
come calling before we knock on his door. If these bedtime
stories are supposed to be helpful to our survival chances in
some way, then | say let’s hear from everyone before the
contributors start getting chopped and diced by that
ambulatory food processor we're so eager to visit.”

“You're disgusting,” said Brawne Lamia.

“Ah, darling,” smiled Silenus, “those are the same words
you whispered last night after your second orgasm.”

Lamia looked away. Father Hoyt cleared his throat and
said, “Whose turn is it? To tell a story, | mean?” The silence
stretched.

“Mine,” said Fedmahn Kassad. The tall man reached into
the pocket of his white tunic and held up a slip of paper with
a large 2 scribbled on it.

“Do you mind doing this now?” asked Sol Weintraub.

Kassad showed a hint of a smile. “I wasn’t in favor of doing
it at all,” he said, “but if it were done when ’tis done, then
‘twere well it were done quickly.”

“Hey!” cried Martin Silenus. “The man knows his pre-
Hegira playwrights.”

“Shakespeare?” said Father Hoyt.

“No,” said Silenus. “Lerner and fucking Lowe. Neil
buggering Simon. Hamel fucking Posten.”

“Colonel,” Sol Weintraub said formally, “the weather is
nice, none of us seems to have anything pressing to do in
the next hour or so, and we would be obliged if you would
Share the tale of what brings you to Hyperion on the Shrike’s
last pilgrimage.”

Kassad nodded. The day grew warmer as the canvas
awning snapped, the decks creaked, and the levitation
barge Benares worked its steady way upstream toward the
mountains, the moors, and the Shrike.

THE SOLDIER’S TALE:
THE WAR LOVERS

t was during the Battle of Agincourt that Fedmahn Kassad
encountered tne woman he would spend the rest of his life
i seeking.

It was a wet and chilly late October morning in A.D.
1415. Kassad had been inserted as an archer into the army
of Henry V of England. The English force had been on French
soil since August 14 and had been retreating from superior
French forces since October 8. Henry had convinced his War
Council that the army could beat the French in a forced
march to the safety of Calais. They had failed. Now, as
October 25 dawned gray and drizzly, seven thousand
Englishmen, mostly bowmen, faced a force of some twenty-
eight thousand French men-at-arms across a kilometer of
muddy field.

Kassad was cold, tired, sick, and scared. He and the other
archers had been surviving on little more than scavenged
berries for the past week of the march and almost every man
on the line that morning was suffering from diarrhea. The air
temperature was in the low fifties Fahrenheit and Kassad had
spent a long night trying to sleep on damp ground. He was
impressed with the unbelievable realism of the experience—
the Olympus Command School Historical Tactical Network
was as far beyond regular stimsims as full-form holos were
beyond tintypes—but the physical sensations were so
convincing, so real, that Kassad did not relish the thought of
being wounded. There were tales of cadets receiving fatal
wounds in the OCS:HTN sims and being pulled dead from
their immersion creches.

Kassad and the other bowmen on Henry’s right flank had
been staring at the larger French force for most of the
morning when pennants waved, the _ fifteenth-century
equivalent of sergeants brayed, and the archers obeyed the
King’s command and began marching against the enemy.
The ragged English line, stretching about seven hundred
meters across the field from treeline to treeline, consisted of
clusters of archers like Kassad’s troop interspersed with

smaller groups of men-at-arms. The English had no formal
cavalry and most of the horses Kassad could see on his end
of the field were carrying men clustered near the King’s
command group three hundred meters toward the center, or
huddled around the Duke of York’s position much closer to
where Kassad and the other archers stood near the right
flank. These command groups reminded Kassad of a
FORCE:ground mobile staff HQ, only instead of the
inevitable forest of comm antennae giving away their
position, bright banners and pennants hung limp on pikes.
An obvious artillery target, thought Kassad, and then
reminded himself that this particular military nuance did not
yet exist.

Kassad noticed that the French had plenty of horses. He
estimated six or seven hundred mounted men formed in
ranks on each of the French flanks and a long line of cavalry
behind the main battle line. Kassad did not like horses. He
had seen holos and pictures, of course, but he had not
encountered the animals themselves until this exercise, and
the size, smell, and sound of them tended to be unnerving—
especially so when the damn quadrupeds were armored
chest and head, shod in steel, and trained to carry armored
men wielding four meters of lance.

The English advance halted. Kassad estimated that his
battle line was about two hundred and fifty meters from the
French. He knew from the experience of the past week that
this was within longbow range, but he also knew that he
would have to pull his arm half out of its socket to hold the
pull.

The French were shouting what Kassad assumed were
insults. He ignored them as he and his silent comrades
stepped forward from where they had planted their long
arrows and found soft ground in which to drive their stakes.
The stakes were long and heavy and Kassad had been
carrying his for a week. Almost a meter and a half long, the
clumsy thing had been sharpened at both ends. When the

order first came down for all archers to find saplings and cut
stakes, somewhere in the deep woods just after they had
crossed the Somme, Kassad had wondered idly what the
things were for. Now he knew.

Every third archer carried a heavy mallet and now they
took turns driving their stakes in at a careful angle. Kassad
pulled out his long knife, resharpened the end which, even
leaning, rose almost to his chest, and stepped back through
the hedgehog of sharpened stakes to await the French
charge.

The French did not charge.

Kassad waited with the others. His bow was strung, forty-
eight arrows were planted in two clusters at his feet, and his
feet were set properly.

The French did not charge.

The rain had stopped but a cool breeze had come up and
what little body heat Kassad had generated by the short
march and the task of driving stakes had been lost quickly.
The only sounds were the metallic shufflings of men and
horses, occasional mutterings or nervous laughs, and the
heavier thud of hooves as the French cavalry rearranged
itself but still refused to charge.

“Fuck this,” said a grizzled yeoman a few feet from Kassad.
“Those bastards’ve wasted our whole bleeding morning.
They’d better piss or get off the pot.”

Kassad nodded. He was not sure if he was hearing and
understanding Middle English or if the sentence had been in
simple Standard. He had no idea if the grizzled archer was
another Command School cadet, an instructor, or merely an
artifact of the sim. He could not guess if the slang had been
correct. He did not care. His heart was pounding and his
palms were sweaty. He wiped his hands on his jerkin.

As if King Henry had taken his cue from the old man’s
muttering, command flags suddenly bobbed and rose,
sergeants screamed, and row upon row of English archers

raised their longbows, pulled when commands were
shouted, released on the next command.

Four waves of arrows comprised of more than six thousand
meter-long, chisel-pointed, clothyard missiles rose, seemed
to hang in a cloud thirty meters up, and fell on the French.

There came the sound of horses screaming and a thousand
demented children pounding on ten thousand tin pots as the
French men-at-arms leaned into the rain of arrows to let their
steel helmets and their chest and shoulder armor take the
brunt of the downpour. Kassad knew that in military terms
little real damage had been done, but this was small solace
to the occasional French soldier with ten inches of arrow
through his eye, or to the scores of horses leaping, tumbling,
and crashing into one another while their riders struggled to
remove wooden shafts from the creatures’ backs and flanks.

The French did not charge.

More commands were shouted. Kassad raised, readied,
loosed his arrow. Again. And again. The sky darkened every
ten seconds. Kassad’s arm and back ached from the
punishing rhythm. He found that he felt neither elation nor
anger. He was doing his job. His forearm was raw. Again the
arrows flew. And again. Fifteen of his first sheaf of twenty-
four arrows were gone when a cry went up along the English
line and Kassad paused and glanced down while holding fall
pull.

The French were charging.

A cavalry charge was something beyond Kassad’s
experience. Watching twelve hundred armored horses
charging directly at him created internal sensations which
Kassad found a bit unnerving. The charge took less than
forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample
time for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to
begin to have problems, and for his testicles to retreat
completely into his body. If the rest of Kassad could have

found a comparable hiding place, he would have seriously
considered crawling into it.

As it was, he was too busy to run.

Firing on command, his line of archers got off five flat
volleys at the attacking horsemen, managed one more shot
in independent fire, and then they fell back five paces.

Horses, it turned out, were too smart to willingly impale
themselves upon stakes—no matter how hard their human
riders implored them to do so—but the second and third
waves of cavalry did not stop as abruptly as the first, and in
a single mad moment horses were down and screaming,
riders were thrown and screaming, and Kassad was out and
screaming, rushing at every downed Frenchman he could
see, wielding a mallet on the prostrate form when he could,
slashing through gaps in armor with his long knife when it
was too crowded to swing the mallet. Soon he and the
grizzled archer and a younger man who had lost his cap
became an efficient killing team, closing in on a downed
rider from three sides, Kassad using the mallet to knock the
pleading horseman off his knees, then all three moving in
with their blades.

Only one knight gained his feet and raised a sword to
confront them. The Frenchman flipped up his visor and
called out a clear request for honor and single combat. The
old man and the youth circled like wolves. Kassad returned
with his bow and put an arrow into the knight’s left eye from
ten paces.

The battle continued in the deadly comic-opera vein
common to all armed combat since the first rock and
thighbone duels on Old Earth. The French cavalry managed
to turn and flee just as the first wave of ten thousand men-
at-arms charged the English center on foot. The melee broke
up the rhythm of the attack and, by the time the French had
regained their initiative, Henry’s own men-at-arms had
braced to hold them at pike length while Kassad and several

thousand other archers poured volley fire into the massed
French infantry at close range.

That did not end the battle. It was not necessarily even
the decisive moment. The turning point, when it came, was
lost—as all such moments are—within the dust and turmoil
of a thousand individual encounters where infantrymen
faced infantrymen across the distance of their personal
weapons. Before it was over some three hours later there
would be minor variations on repeated themes, ineffective
thrusts and clumsy counterthrusts, and a less than
honorable moment when Henry would order prisoners killed
rather than leave them in the rear when the English were
confronted with a new threat. But the heralds and historians
would later agree that the outcome had been sealed
somewhere in the confusion during the first French infantry
charge. The French died in the thousands. English dominion
on that part of the Continent would continue for a while. The
day of the armored man-at-arms, the knight, the
embodiment of chivalry, was over—hammered into history’s
coffin by a few thousand ragtag peasant archers carrying
longbows. The ultimate insult to the noble-born French dead
—if the dead indeed could be further insulted—lay in the
fact that the English archers were not only common men,
common in the lowest, most flea-infested sense of the word,
but that they were draftees. Doughboys. Gls. Grunts. AIPs.
Spezzes. K-techs. Jump Rats.

But all that was in the lesson Kassad was supposed to
have learned during that OCS:HTN exercise. He learned
none of it. He was too busy having an encounter which
would change his life.

The French man-at-arms went over the head of his falling
horse, rolled once, and was up and running for the woods
before the mud quit flying. Kassad followed. He was halfway
to the tree line before he realized that the youth and the

grizzled archer had not come with him. It did not matter.
Kassad’s adrenaline was flowing and the bloodlust had him
in its grip.

The man-at-arms, who had just been thrown to the ground
from a horse moving at full gallop and who was wearing
sixty pounds of clumsy armor, should have been an easy
prey to catch. He was not. The Frenchman glanced back
once, saw Kassad coming on a full run with a mallet in his
hand and his eye full of business, and then the man-at-arms
shifted into a higher gear and reached the trees fifteen
meters ahead of his pursuer.

Kassad was deep into the woods before he stopped, leaned
on the mallet, gasped, and considered his position. Thuds,
screams, and crashes from the battlefield behind him were
muffled by distance and shrubbery. The trees were almost
bare and still dripped from the rainstorm the night before;
the floor of the forest was carpeted with a thick layer of old
leaves and a snarl of shrubs and brambles. The man-at-arms
had left a trail of broken branches and footsteps for the first
twenty meters or so, but now deer trails and overgrown
paths made it difficult to see where he had passed.

Kassad moved slowly, stepping deeper into the woods,
trying to be alert for any noise above the sound of his own
panting and the insane pounding of his heart. It occurred to
Kassad that, tactically speaking, this was not a brilliant
move; the man-at-arms had been wearing full armor and
carrying his sword when he disappeared in the bushes. At
any moment the Frenchman might forget his panic, regret
his temporary loss of honor, and remember his years of
combat training. Kassad also had been trained. He looked
down at his cloth shirt and leather vest. The mallet was still
in his hands, the knife in his broad belt. He had been trained
to use high-energy weapons with a killing range of a few
meters to thousands of kilometers. He had been rated in
plasma grenades, hellwhips, fleschette rifles, sonics,

recoilless zero-gravity weapons, deathwands, kinetic assault
guns, and beam gauntlets. He now had a working
knowledge of an English longbow. None of these objects—
including the longobow—was on his person at the moment.

“Ah, shit,” murmured Second Lieutenant Kassad.

The man-at-arms came out of the bushes like a charging
bear, arms up, legs apart, the sword coming around in a flat
arc meant to disembowel Kassad. The OCS cadet tried to
leap back and raise his mallet at the same time. Neither
effort was completely successful. The Frenchman’s sword
knocked the heavy mallet out of Kassad’s grip while the dull
point of the blade slashed through leather, shirt, and skin.

Kassad bellowed and stumbled backward again, tugging
at the knife in his belt. His right heel caught the branch of a
fallen tree and he went down backward, cursing and rolling
deeper into the tangle of branches as the man-at-arms
crashed forward, his heavy sword clearing limbs like an
oversized machete. Kassad had his knife out by the time the
man-at-arms had cleared a path through the deadfall, but
the ten-inch blade was a pitiful thing against armor unless
the knight was helpless. This knight was not helpless.
Kassad knew that he would never get inside the arc of sword
blade. His only hope was in running, but the tall trunk of the
fallen tree behind him and the deadfall beyond eliminated
that option. He did not wish to get cut down from behind as
he turned. Nor from below as he climbed. Kassad did not
wish to be cut down from any angle.

Kassad went into a knife fighter’s crouch which he hadn’t
used since his street-fighting days in the Tharsis slums. He
wondered how the simulation would deal with his death.

The figure appeared behind the man-at-arms like a sudden
shadow. The noise of Kassad’s mallet striking the knight’s
armored shoulder sounded precisely like someone bashing
the hood of an EMV with a sledgehammer.

The Frenchman staggered, turned to meet the new threat,
and took a second mallet blow in the chest. Kassad’s savior

was small; the man-at-arms did not go down. The French
Knight was raising his sword above his head when Kassad hit
him behind and below the knees with a shoulder tackle.

Tree limbs snapped as the Frenchman went down. The
small attacker stood astride the knight, pinning the armored
man’s sword arm with one foot while bringing the mallet
down repeatedly onto helmet and visor. Kassad extricated
himself from the tangle of legs and branches, sat on the
downed man’s knees, and began slashing through gaps in
armor at groin, sides, and underarms. Kassad’s rescuer
jumped aside to plant both feet on the knight’s wrist and
Kassad scrambled forward, stabbing through crevices where
the helmet met chest armor, finally slamming the blade
through slits in the visor itself.

The knight screamed as the mallet came down a final
time, almost catching Kassad’s hand as the hammer drove
the blade through the visor slit like a ten-inch tent peg. The
man-at-arms arched, lifting Kassad and sixty pounds of
armor clear of the ground in a final violent spasm and then
fell back limply.

Kassad rolled onto his side. His rescuer collapsed beside
him. Both were covered with sweat and the dead man’s
blood. Kassad looked at his savior. The woman was tall and
dressed in clothes not dissimilar to Kassad’s. For a moment
they merely lay there and gasped for air.

“Are you ... all right?” Kassad managed after a while. He
was suddenly struck by her appearance. Her brown hair was
short by current Worldweb fashion, short and straight and
cut so that the longest strands fell from the part, just a few
centimeters left of the center of her forehead, to just above
her right ear. It was a boy’s haircut from some forgotten
time, but she was no boy. Kassad thought that she was
perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen: bone
structure so perfect that chin and cheekbones were shaped
without being too sharp, large eyes glowing with life and
intelligence, a gentle mouth with a soft underlip. Lying next

to her, Kassad realized that she was tall—not so tall as he
but obviously not a woman from the fifteenth century—and
even under her loose tunic and baggy trousers he could see
the soft swell of hips and breast. She appeared to be a few
years older than Kassad, perhaps in her late twenties, but
this fact barely registered as she continued staring into his
face with those soft, beguiling, endlessly deep eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asked again. His voice sounded
strange even to himself.

She did not answer. Or, rather, she answered by sliding
long fingers across Kassad’s chest, ripping away the leather
thongs which bound the rough vest. Her hands found his
Shirt. It was soaked With blood and ripped halfway down the
front. The woman ripped it open the rest of the way. She
moved against him now, her fingers and lips on his chest,
hips already beginning to move. Her right hand found the
cords to his trouser front, ripped them free.

Kassad helped her pull off the rest of his clothes, removed
hers with three fluid movements. She wore nothing under
her shirt and coarse-cloth trousers. Kassad’s hand slid
between her thighs, behind her, cupped her moving
buttocks, pulled her closer, and slid to the moist roughness
in front. She opened to him, her mouth closing on his.
Somehow, with all of their motion and disrobing, their skin
never lost contact. Kassad felt his own excitement rubbing
against the cusp of her belly.

She rolled above him then, her thighs astride his hips, her
gaze still locked with his. Kassad had never been so excited.
He gasped as her right hand went behind her, found him,
guided him into her. When he opened his eyes again she
was moving slowly, her head back, eyes closed. Kassad’s
hands moved up her sides to cup her perfect breasts.
Nipples hardened against his palms.

They made love then. Kassad, at twenty-three standard
years, had been in love once and had enjoyed sex many
times. He thought he knew the way and the why of it. There

was nothing in his experience to that moment which he
could not have described with a phrase and a laugh to his
squadmates in the hold of a troop transport. With the calm,
sure cynicism of a twenty-three-year-old veteran he was sure
that he would never experience anything that could not be
so described, so dismissed. He was wrong. He could never
adequately share the sense of the next few minutes with
anyone else. He would never try.

They made love in a sudden shaft of late October light
with a carpet of leaves and clothes beneath them and a film
of blood and sweat oiling the sweet friction between them.
Her green eyes stared down at Kassad, widening slightly
when he began moving quickly, closing at the same second
he closed his.

They moved together then in the sudden tide of sensation
as old and inevitable as the movement of worlds: pulses
racing, flesh quickening with its own moist purposes, a
further, final rising together, the world receding to nothing
at all—and then, still joined by touch and heartbeat and the
fading thrill of passion, allowing consciousness to slide back
to separate flesh while the world flowed in through forgotten
senses.

They lay next to each other. The dead man’s armor was
cold against Kassad’s left arm, her thigh warm against his
right leg. The sunlight was a benediction. Hidden colors rose
to the surface of things. Kassad turned his head and gazed
at her as she rested her head on his shoulder. Her cheeks
glowed with flush and autumn light and her hair lay like
copper threads along the flesh of his arm. She curved her
leg over his thigh and Kassad felt the clockwise stirring of
renewed passion. The sun was warm on his face. He closed
his eyes.

When he awoke she was gone. He was certain that only
seconds had passed—no more than a minute, certainly—but
the sunlight was gone, colors had flowed out of the forest,
and a cool evening breeze moved bare branches.

Kassad dressed in torn clothes made stiff with blood. The
French man-at-arms lay still and rigid in the unself-conscious
attitude of death. He already seemed inanimate, a part of
the forest. There was no sign whatsoever of the woman.

Fedmahn Kassad limped his way back through the woods,
evening gloom, and a sudden, chilling drizzle.

The battlefield still held people, living and dead. The dead
lay in heaps like the piles of toy soldiers Kassad had played
with as a child. Wounded men moved slowly with the help of
friends. Here and there furtive forms picked their way among
the dead, and near the opposite tree line a lively group of
heralds, both French and English, met in conclave with
much pointing and animated conversation. Kassad knew
that they had to decide upon a name for the battle so that
their respective records would agree. He also knew that they
would settle on the name of the nearest castle, Agincourt,
even though it had figured in neither strategy nor battle.

Kassad was beginning to think that this was no simulation,
that his life in the Worldweb was the dream and that this
gray day had to be reality, when suddenly the entire scene
froze with Outlines of human figures, horses, and the
darkening forest becoming as transparent as a fading holo.
And then Kassad was being helped out of his simulation
creche at the Olympus Command School and the other
cadets and instructors were rising, talking, laughing with
one another—all seemingly unaware that the world had
changed forever.

For weeks Kassad spent every free hour wandering the
Command School grounds, watching from the ramparts as
the evening shadow of Mons Olympus covered first the
Plateau forest, then the heavily settled highlands, then
everything halfway to the horizon, and then all the world.
And every second he thought about what had happened. He
thought about her.

No one else had noticed anything strange in the
simulation. No one else had left the battlefield. One
instructor explained that nothing beyond the battlefield
existed in that particular segment of the simulation. No one
had missed Kassad. It was as if the incident in the forest—
and the woman—had never happened.

Kassad knew better. He attended his classes on military
history and mathematics. He put in his hours at the firing
range and gym. He walked off barracks punishments on the
Caldera Quadrangle, although these were rare. In general,
young Kassad became an even more excellent officer cadet
than he had been. But all the while he waited.

And then she came again.

Again it was in the final hours of an OCS:HTN simulation.
By then Kassad had learned that the exercises were
something more than mere simulations. The OCS:HTN was
part of the Worldweb All Thing, the real-time network which
governed Hegemony politics, fed information to tens of
billions of data-hungry citizens, and had evolved a form of
autonomy and consciousness all its own. More than a
hundred and fifty planetary dataspheres mingled their
resources within the framework created by six thousand
omega-class Als to allow the OCS:HTN to function.

“The HTN stuff doesn’t simulate,” whined Cadet Radinski,
the best Al expert Kassad could find and bribe to explain, “it
dreams, dreams with the best historical accuracy in the Web
—way beyond the sum of its parts cause it plugs in holistic
insight as well as facts—and when it dreams, it lets us dream
with it.”

Kassad had not understood but he had believed. And then
she came again.

In the First U.S. Vietnam War they made love in the
aftermath of an ambush during the darkness and terror of a
night patrol. Kassad wore rough camouflage clothes—with

no underwear because of the jungle crotch rot—and a steel
helmet not much more advanced than those at Agincourt.
She wore black pajamas and sandals, the universal garb of
the Southeast Asian peasant. And the Viet Cong. Then
neither of them wore anything as they made love standing
in the night, her back against a tree and her legs wrapped
around him, while beyond them the world exploded in the
green glow of perimeter flares and the sputter-crack of
claymores.

She came to him on the second day of Gettysburg and
again at Borodino, where the clouds of powder smoke hung
above the piles of bodies like a vapor congealed from
departing souls.

They made love in the shattered hulk of an AFC in Hellas
Basin while the hovertank battle still raged and the red dust
of the approaching simoon scraped and shrieked at the
titanium hull. “Tell me your name,” he had whispered in
Standard. She shook her head. “Are you real—outside the
simulation?” he asked in the Japanese-English of that era.
She had nodded and leaned closer to kiss him.

They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of
Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like
blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls. During an
unnamed battle after a siege of a forgotten tower city on the
Russian steppes, he pulled her back into the shattered room
where they had made love, and he whispered, “I want to
stay with you.” She touched his lips with a finger and shook
her head. After the evacuation of New Chicago, as they lay
on the hundredth-floor balcony where Kassad had set his
Sniper’s nest for the last U.S. Presidents hopeless rear-guard
action, he placed his hand on the warm flesh between her
breasts and said, “Can you ever join me ... out there?” She
touched his cheek with her palm and smiled.

During the last year in Command School there were only
five OCS:HTN sims as the cadets’ training shifted to live field
exercises. Sometimes, as when Kassad was strapped into the

tactical command chair during a battalion-sized drop onto
Ceres, he closed his eyes, looked between the primary-
colored geographies of the cortically generated
tactical/terrain matrix, and felt a sense of ... someone? Of
her? He was not sure.

And then she did not come again. Not in the final months
of work. Not in the final simulation of the great Coal Sack
Battle where General Horace Glennon-Height’s mutiny was
defeated. Not during the parades and parties of graduation,
nor as the class marched in a final Olympian review before
the Hegemony CEO, saluting from his red-lit levitation deck.

And there was no time even for dreaming as the young
officers farcast to Earth’s Moon for the Masada Ceremony,
farcast again to Tau Ceti Center for their formal swearing-in
to FORCE, and then they were finished.

Second Lieutenant Cadet Kassad became Lieutenant
Kassad, spent three standard weeks free in the Web with a
FORCE-issued universal card which allowed him to farcast as
far and as frequently as he wished, and then he was shipped
out to the Hegemony Colonial Service training school on
Lusus to prepare for active duty beyond the Web. He was
sure that he would never see her again.

He was wrong.

Fedmahn Kassad had grown up in a culture of poverty and
sudden death. As a member of the minority who still called
themselves Palestinians, he and his family had lived in the
slums of Tharsis, human testimony to the bitter legacy of the
terminally dispossessed. Every Palestinian in the Worldweb
and beyond carried the cultural memory of a century of
struggle capped by a month of nationalist triumph before
the Nuclear Jihad of 2038 wiped it all away. Then came their
second Diaspora, this one lasting five centuries and leading
to dead-end desert worlds like Mars, their dream buried with
the death of Old Earth.

Kassad, like the other boys of the South Tharsis Relocation
Camps, either ran with gangs or faced the option of being
prey to every self-proclaimed predator in the camps. He
chose to run with the gangs. Kassad had killed another
youth by the time he was sixteen standard years old.

If Mars was known for anything in the Worldweb, it was for
hunting in the Mariner Valley, Schrauder’s Zen Massif in
Hellas Basin, and the Olympus Command School. Kassad did
not have to travel to Mariner Valley to learn about hunting
and being hunted, he had no interest in Zen Gnosticism, and
as a teenager he felt nothing but contempt for the
uniformed cadets who came from every part of the Web to
train for FORCE. He joined with his peers in sneering at the
New Bushido as a code for faggots, but an ancient vein of
honor in the young Kassad’s soul secretly resonated to the
thought of a samurai class whose life and work revolved
around duty, self-respect, and the ultimate value of one’s
word.

When Kassad was eighteen, a Tharsis Province higher
circuit judge offered him the choice of a Martian year at
polar work camp or volunteering for the John Carter Brigade
then forming to help FORCE put down the resurgent
Glennon-Height Rebellion in the Class Three colonies.
Kassad volunteered and discovered that he enjoyed the
discipline and cleanliness of military life, even though the
John Carter Brigade saw only garrison duty within the Web
and was dissolved shortly after Glennon-Height’s cloned
grandson died on Renaissance. Two days after his nineteenth
birthday, Kassad applied to FORCE:ground and was turned
down. He went on a nine-day drunk, awoke in one of the
deeper hive tunnels of Lusus with his military comlog
implant stolen—by someone who apparently had taken a
correspondence course in surgery—his universal, card and
farcaster access revoked, and his head exploring new
frontiers of pain.

Kassad worked on Lusus for a standard year, saving over
six thousand marks and allowing physical labor in the 1.3-ES
gravity to put an end to his Martian frailness. By the time he
used his savings to ship out to Maui-Covenant on an ancient
solar sail freighter with jury-rigged Hawking drives, Kassad
was still lean and tall by Web standards, but what muscles
there were worked wonderfully well by anyone’s standards.

He arrived on Maui-Covenant three days before the vicious
and unpopular Island War began there, and eventually the
FORCE:combined commander at Firstsite got so tired of
seeing the young Kassad waiting in his outer office that he
allowed the boy to enlist in the 23rd Supply Regiment as an
assistant hydrofoil driver. Eleven standard months later,
Corporal Fedmahn Kassad of the Twelfth Mobile Infantry
Battalion had received two Distinguished Service Clusters, a
Senate Commendation for valor in the Equatorial
Archipelago campaign, and two Purple Hearts. He was also
tapped for FORCE command school and shipped Webward
on the next convoy.

Kassad dreamed of her often. He had never learned her
name, she had never spoken, but he could have recognized
her touch and scent in total darkness among a thousand
others. He thought of her as Mystery.

When other young officers went whoring or seeking
girlfriends in the indigenie populations, Kassad would
remain on base or take long walks through strange cities. He
kept his obsession with Mystery secret, knowing full well
how it would read on a psych report. Sometimes, on bivouac
under multiple moons or in the womblike zero-g of a troop
transport hold, Kassad would realize how insane his love
affair with a phantom truly was. But then he would recall the
small mole under her left breast which he had kissed one
night, feeling her heartbeat under his lips as the ground
itself shook from the firing of the big guns near Verdun. He

would remember the impatient gesture with which she
brushed back her hair as her cheek rested on his thigh. And
the young officers would go to town or to the huts near the
base, and Fedmahn Kassad would read another history book
or jog along the perimeter or run tactical strategies on his
comlog.

It was not long before Kassad came to the attention of his
superiors.

During the undeclared war with the Free Miners in the
Lambert Ring Territories, it was Lieutenant Kassad who led
the surviving infantry troops and Marine guards in cutting
through the bottom of the old asteroid bore shaft on
Peregrine to evacuate the Hegemony consulate staff and
citizens.

But it was during the short reign of the New Prophet on
Qom-Riyadh that Captain Fedmahn Kassad came to the
attention of the entire Web.

The FORCE:space captain of the only Hegemony ship
within two leap years of the colony world had been paying a
courtesy call when the New Prophet chose to lead thirty
million New Order Shi'ites against two continents of Suni
shopkeepers and ninety thousand resident Hegemony
infidels. The ship’s captain and five of his executive officers
were taken prisoner. Urgent fatline messages from Tau Ceti
Center demanded that the ranking officer aboard the
orbiting HS Denieve settle the situation on Qom-Riyadh, free
all hostages, and depose the New Prophet ... without
resorting to the use of nuclear weapons within the planet’s
atmosphere. The Denieve was an aging orbital defense
picket. It carried no nuclear weapons that could be used
within an atmosphere. The ranking officer on board was
FORCE:combined Captain Fedmahn Kassad.

On the third day of the revolution, Kassad landed the
Denieve's single assault boat in the main courtyard of the
Grand Mosque at Mashhad. He and the other thirty-four
FORCE troopers watched as the mob grew to three hundred

thousand militants kept at bay only by the boat's
containment field and the lack of an order to attack by the
New Prophet. The New Prophet himself was no longer in the
Grand Mosque; he had flown to the northern hemisphere of
Riyadh to join in the victory celebrations there.

Two hours after he landed, Captain Kassad stepped out of
his ship and broadcast a short announcement. He said that
he had been raised as a Muslim. He also announced that
interpretation of the Koran since the Shi'ites’ seedship days
had definitely shown that the God of Islam would neither
condone nor allow the slaughter of the innocent, no matter
how many jihads were proclaimed by tinhorn heretics like
the New Prophet. Captain Kassad gave the leaders of the
thirty million zealots three hours to surrender their hostages
and return to their homes on the desert continent of Qom.

In the first three days of the revolution the armies of the
New Prophet had occupied most of the cities on two
continents and had taken more than twenty-seven thousand
Hegemony hostages. Firing squads had been busy day and
night settling ancient theological disputes and it was
estimated that at least a quarter of a million Sunis had been
slaughtered in the first two days of the New Prophet’s
occupation. In response to Kassad’s ultimatum, the New
Prophet announced that all of the infidels would be put to
death immediately following his live television address that
evening. He also ordered an attack on Kassad’s assault boat.

Avoiding high explosives because of the Grand Mosque,
the Revolutionary Guard used automatic weapons, crude
energy cannon, plasma charges, and human wave attacks.
The containment field held.

The New Prophet’s televised address began fifteen
minutes before Kassad’s ultimatum ran out. The New
Prophet agreed with Kassad’s statement that Allah would
horribly punish heretics but announced that it was the
Hegemony infidels who would be so punished. It was the
only time the New Prophet ever had been seen to lose his

temper on camera. Screaming, saliva flying, he ordered the
human wave attacks to be renewed on the grounded assault
boat. He announced that at that moment a dozen fission
bombs were being assembled at the occupied Power for
Peace reactor in Ali. With these, the forces of Allah would be
carried into space itself. The first fission bomb, he explained,
would be used on the infidel Kassad’s satanic assault boat
that very afternoon. The New Prophet then began to explain
exactly how the Hegemony hostages would be executed, but
at that moment Kassad’s deadline ran out.

Qom-Riyadh was, by its own choice and the accident of its
distant location, a technically primitive world. But the
inhabitants were not so primitive that they did not have an
active datasphere. Nor were the revolutionary mullahs who
had led the invasion so opposed to the “Great Satan of
Hegemony Science” that they refused to tie into the global
data net with their personal comlogs.

The HS Denieve had seeded enough spysats so that by
1729 hours Qom-Riyadh Central Time, the datasphere had
been tapped to the point that the Hegemony ship had
identified sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty
revolutionary mullahs by their access codes. At 1729:30
hours the spysats began feeding their real-time targeting
data to the twenty-one perimeter defense sats which
Kassad’s assault boat had left in low orbit. These orbital
defense weapons were so old that the Denieve’s mission had
been to return them to the Web for safe destruction. Kassad
had suggested another use for them.

At precisely 1730 hours, nineteen of the small satellites
detonated their fusion cores. In the nanoseconds before
their self-destruction, the resulting X rays were focused,
aimed, and released in sixteen thousand eight hundred and
thirty invisible but very coherent beams. The ancient
defense sats were not designed for atmospheric use and had
an effective destructive radius of less than a millimeter.
Luckily, that was all that was needed. Not all of the targeting

beams penetrated whatever stood between the mullahs and
the sky. Fifteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-four did.

The effect was immediate and dramatic. In each case the
target’s brain and cerebral fluid boiled, turned to vapor, and
blew the encasing skull to bits. The New Prophet was in the
middle of his live, planetwide broadcast—literally in the
middle of pronouncing the word “heretic”—when 1730 hours
arrived.

For almost two minutes the TV screens and walls around
the planet carried the image of the New Prophet’s headless
body slumped over the microphone. Then Fedmahn Kassad
cut in on all bands to announce that his next deadline was
one hour away and that any actions against the hostages
would be met with a more dramatic demonstration of Allah’s
displeasure.

There were no reprisals.

That night, in orbit around Qom-Riyadh, Mystery visited
Kassad for the first time since his cadet days. He was asleep
but the visit was more than a dream and less than the
alternative reality of the OCS:HTN sims. The woman and he
were lying together under a light blanket beneath a broken
roof. Her skin was warm and electric, her face little more
than a pale outline against nighttime darkness. Overhead
the stars had just begun to fade into the false light of
predawn. Kassad realized that she was trying to speak to
him; her soft lips formed words which were just below the
threshold of Kassad’s hearing. He pulled back al second in
order to see her face better and, in so doing, lost contact
completely. He awoke in his sleep webbing with moistute on
his cheeks and the hum of the ship’s systems sounding as
strange to him as the breathing of some half-awakened
beast.

Nine standard ship-weeks later, Kassad stood before a
FORCE court-martial review on Freeholm. He had known

when he made his decision on Qom-Riyadh that his
superiors would have no choice but to crucify or promote
him.

FORCE prided itself on preparing itself for all
contingencies in the Web or the colonial regions, but
nothing had properly prepared it for the Battle of South
Bressia and its implications for the New Bushido.

The New Bushido Code which governed Colonel Kassad’s
life had evolved out of the necessity for the military class to
survive. After the obscenities of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries on Old Earth, when military leaders
had committed their nations to strategies wherein entire
civilian populations were legitimate targets while their
uniformed executioners sat safe in self-contained bunkers
fifty meters under the earth, the repugnance of the
surviving civilians was so great that for more than a century
the word “military” was an invitation to a lynching.

As the New Bushido evolved it combined the age-old
concepts of honor and individual courage with the need to
Spare civilians whenever possible. It also saw the wisdom of
returning to the pre-Napoleonic concepts of small, “nontotal”
wars with defined goals and proscribed excesses. The Code
demanded a forsaking of nuclear weapons and strategic
bombing campaigns in all but the most extreme cases but,
more than that, it demanded a return to Old Earth medieval
concepts of set battles between small, professional forces at
a mutually agreed-upon time in a place where destruction of
public and private property would be kept to a minimum.

This Code worked well for the first four centuries of post-
Hegira expansion. The fact that essential technologies were
essentially frozen in place for three of those centuries
worked in the Hegemony’s favor as its monopoly on the use
of farcasters allowed it to apply the modest resources of
FORCE at the right place in the required amount of time.

Even when separated by the inevitable leap years of time-
debt, no colonial or independent world could hope to match
the power of the Hegemony. Incidents such as the political
rebellion on Maui-Covenant, with its unique guerrilla
warfare, or the religious insanity on Qom-Riyadh were put
down quickly and firmly and any excesses in the campaigns
merely pointed, out the importance of returning to the strict
Code of the New Bushido. But for all of FORCE’S calculations
and preparations, no one had adequately planned on the
inevitable confrontation with the Ousters.

The Ousters had been the single external threat to the
Hegemony for the four centuries since the forebears of the
barbarian hordes had left Sol System in their crude fleet of
leaking O'Neill cities, tumbling asteroids, and experimental
comet farm clusters. Even after the, Ousters acquired the
Hawking drive, it remained official Hegemony policy to
ignore them as long as their swarms stayed in the darkness
between the stars and limited their in-system plunderings to
scooping small amounts of hydrogen from gas giants and
water ice from uninhabited moons.

The early Outback skirmishes such as Bent’s World and
CHC 2990 were considered aberrations, of little interest to
the Hegemony. Even the pitched battle for Lee Three had
been treated as a Colonial Service problem and when the
FORCE task force arrived six local years after the attack, five
years after the Ousters departed, any atrocities were
conveniently forgotten in favor of the view that no barbarian
raid would repeat itself when the Hegemony chose to flex its
muscle.

In the decades which followed Lee Three, FORCE and
Ouster space forces skirmished in a hundred border areas,
but except for the odd Marine encounters in airless,
weightless places, there were no infantry confrontations.
Stories in the Worldweb proliferated: the Ousters would
never be a threat to Earthlike worlds because of their three
centuries of adaptation to weightlessness; the Ousters had

evolved into something more—or less—than human; the
Ousters did not have farcaster technology, would never have
it, and thus never would be a threat to FORCE. Then came
Bressia.

Bressia was one of those smug, independent worlds,
pleased with both its convenient access to the Web and its
eight-month separation from it, growing rich from the export
of diamonds, burr root, and its unequaled coffee, coyly
refusing to become a colony world but still dependent upon
the Hegemony Protectorate and Common Market to meet its
soaring economic goals. As with most such worlds, Bressia
was proud of its Self-defense Force: twelve torchships, a
refitted attack carrier which had been decommissioned by
FORCE: space half a century earlier, twoscore or more of
small, fast orbital patrol vessels, a standing army of ninety
thousand volunteers, a respectable oceangoing navy, and a
store of nuclear weapons stockpiled purely for symbolic
purposes.

The Ouster Hawking wake had been noticed by Hegemony
monitoring stations but was misinterpreted as merely
another swarm migration which would pass no closer than
half a light-year to the Bressian system. Instead, with a
single course correction which was not detected until the
swarm was within the Oort cloud radius, the Ousters fell on
Bressia like some Old Testament plague. A minimum of
seven standard months separated Bressia from any
Hegemony rescue or response.

Bressia’s space force was obliterated within the first
twenty hours of fighting. The Ouster swarm then put more
than three thousand ships into Bressia’s cislunar space and
began the systematic reduction of all planetary defenses.

The world had been settled by no-nonsense Central
Europeans in the first wave of the Hegira, and its two
continents bore the prosaic names of North Bressia and
South Bressia. North Bressia held desert, high tundra, and
six major cities housing mostly burr-root harvesters’ and

petroleum engineers. South Bressia, much more temperate
in climate and geography, was the home for most of the
world’s four hundred million people and the huge coffee
plantations.

As if to demonstrate what war had once been about, the
Ousters scoured North Bressia—first with several hundred
fallout-free nuclear weapons and tactical plasma bombs,
then with deathbeams, and finally with tailored viruses. Only
a handful of the fourteen million residents escaped. South
Bressia received no bombardment except for the lancing of
specific military targets, airports, and the large harbor at
Solno.

FORCE doctrine held that, while a world could be reduced
from orbit, actual military invasion of an industrialized
planet was an impossibility; the problems with landing
logistics, the immense area to be occupied, and the
unwieldy size of the invading army were considered to be
the ultimate arguments against invasion.

The Ousters obviously had not read the FORCE doctrine
books. On the twenty-third day of the investiture, more than
two thousand dropships and assault boats fell on South
Bressia. What was left of the Bressian air force was
destroyed in those first hours of the invasion. Two nuclear
devices were actually detonated against Ouster staging
areas: the first was deflected by energy fields and the
second destroyed a single scoutship which may have been a
decoy.

Ousters, it turned out, had changed physically in three
centuries. They did prefer zero-gravity environments. But
their mobile infantry’s powered exoskeletons served very
well and it was only a matter of days before the black-clad,
long-limbed Ouster troops were swarming over South
Bressia’s cities like an infestation of giant spiders.

The last organized resistance collapsed on the nineteenth
day of the invasion. Buckminster, the capital, fell the same
day. The last fatline message from Bressia to the Hegemony

was cut off in mid-transmission an hour after Ouster troops
entered the city.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad arrived with FORCE Fleet One
twenty-nine standard weeks later. Thirty omega-class
torchships protecting a single, farcaster-equipped JumpShip
penetrated the system at high speed. The singularity sphere
was activated three hours after spin-down and ten hours
after that there were four hundred FORCE ships of the line in
system. The counterinvasion began twenty-one hours later.

Those were the mathematics of the first minutes of the
Battle of Bressia. For Kassad, the memory of those days and
weeks held not mathematics but the terrible beauty of
combat. It was the first time JumpShips had been used on
anything above a division level and there was the expected
confusion. Kassad went through from five light-minutes out
and fell into gravel and yellow dust because the assault boat
farcaster portal was facing down a steep incline made slick
with mud and the blood of the first squads through. Kassad
lay in the mud and looked down the hillside at madness. Ten
of the seventeen farcaster assault boats were down and
burning, scattered across the foothills and plantation fields
like broken toys. The containment fields of the surviving
boats were shrinking under an onslaught of missile and CPB
fire that turned the landing areas into domes of orange
flame. Kassad’s tactical display was a hopeless mess; his
visor showed a garble of impossible fire vectors, blinking red
phosphors where FORCE troops lay dying, and overlays of
Ouster jamming ghosts. Someone was screaming “Oh,
goddammit! Goddammit! Oh, goddammit!” on his primary
command circuit and the implants registered a void where
Command Group’s data should be.

An enlisted man helped him up, Kassad flicked mud off his
command wand and got out of the way of the next squad
farcasting through, and the war was on.

From his first minutes on South Bressia, Kassad realized
that the New Bushido was dead. Eighty thousand superbly
armed and trained FORCE:ground troops advanced from
their staging areas, seeking battle in an unpopulated place.
Ouster forces retreated behind a line of scorched earth,
leaving only booby traps and dead civilians. FORCE used
farcasters to outmaneuver the enemy, to force him to fight.
The Ousters responded with a barrage of nuclear and plasma
weapons, pinning the ground troops under forcefields while
the Ouster infantry retreated to prepared defenses around
cities and drop-ship staging areas.

There were no quick victories in space to shift the balance
on South Bressia. Despite feints and occasional fierce
battles, the Ousters retained complete control of everything
within three AU of Bressia. FORCE:space units fell back and
concentrated on keeping the fleet within farcaster range and
protecting the primary JumpShip.

What had been forecast as a two-day battle ground on for
thirty days, then sixty. Warfare had been thrown back to the
twentieth or twenty-first century: long, grim campaigns
fought through the brick dust of ruined cities over the
corpses of civilians. The eighty thousand original FORCE
troops were ground up, reinforced with a hundred thousand
more, and were still being decimated when the call went out
for two hundred thousand more. Only the grim resolve of
Meina Gladstone and a dozen other determined senators
kept the war alive and the troops dying while the billions of
voices of the All Thing and the Al Advisory Council called for
disengagement.

Kassad had understood the change of tactics almost at
once. His street-fighting instincts had risen to the forefront
even before most of his division was wiped out in the Battle
of the Stoneheap. While other FORCE commanders were all
but ceasing to function, frozen into indecision by this
violation of the New Bushido, Kassad—in command of his
regiment and in temporary command of his division after the

nuking of Command Group Delta—was trading men for time
and calling for the release of fusion weapons to spearhead
his own counterattack. By the time the Ousters withdrew
ninety-seven days after the FORCE “rescue” of Bressia,
Kassad had earned the double-edged nickname of the
Butcher of South Bressia. It was rumored that even his own
troops were afraid of him.

And Kassad dreamed of her with dreams that were more—
and less—than dreams.

On the last night of the Battle for Stoneheap, in the maze
of dark tunnels where Kassad and his hunter-killer groups
used sonics and T-5 gas to flush out the last warrens of
Ouster commandos, the Colonel fell asleep amid the flame
and screams and felt the touch of her long fingers on his
cheek and the soft compression of her breasts against him.

When they entered New Vienna on the morning after the
Space strike Kassad had called in, the troops following the
glass-smooth, twenty-meter-wide burn grooves into the
lanced city, Kassad had stared without blinking at the rows
of human heads lying on the pavement, carefully lined up as
if to welcome the rescuing FORCE troops with their
accusatory stares. Kassad had returned to his command
EMV, closed the hatches, and—curling up in the warm
darkness smelling of rubber, heated plastics, charged ions—
had heard her Whispers over the babble of the C3 channels
and implant coding.

On the night before the Ouster retreat, Kassad left the
command conference on the HS Brazil, farcast to his HQ in
the Indelibies north of the Hyne Valley, and took his
command car to the summit to watch the final
bombardment. The nearest of the tactical nuclear strikes
was forty-five kilometers away. The plasma bombs
blossomed like orange and blood-red flowers planted in a
perfect grid. Kassad counted more than two hundred
dancing columns of green light as the hellwhip lances ripped
the broad plateau to shreds. And even before he slept, while

he sat on the flare skirt of the EMV and shook pale
afterimages from his eyes, she came. She wore a pale blue
dress and walked lightly between the dead burr-root plants
on the hillside. The breeze lifted the hem of the soft fabric of
her dress. Her face and arms were pale, almost translucent.
She called his name—he could almost hear the words—and
then the second wave of bombardment rolled in across the
plain below him and everything was lost in noise and flame.

As tends to be the case in a universe apparently ruled by
irony, Fedmahn Kassad passed unscathed through ninety-
seven days of the worst fighting the Hegemony had ever
seen, only to be wounded two days after the last of the
Ousters had retreated to their fleeing swarmships. He was in
the Civic Center Building in Buckminster, one of only three
buildings left standing in the city, giving curt answers to
stupid questions from a Worldweb newsteep when a plasma
booby trap no larger than a microswitch exploded fifteen
floors above, blew the newsteep and two of Kassad’s aides
through a ventilator grille into the street beyond, and
dropped the building on him.

Kassad was medevacked to division HQ and then farcast to
the JumpShip now in orbit around Bressia’s second moon.
There he was resuscitated and put on full life support while
the military brass and Hegemony politicians decided what to
do with him.

Because of the farcaster connection and the real-time
media coverage of Bressia, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had
become somewhat of a cause célèbre. Those billions who
had been appalled by the unprecedented savagery of the
South Bressia campaign would have been pleased to see
Kassad court-martialed or tried for war crimes. CEO
Gladstone and many others considered Kassad and the other
FORCE commanders as Saviors.

In the end, Kassad was put on a hospital spinship for the
slow trip back to the Web. Since most of the physical repair
would be done in fugue anyway, it made some sense to let
the old hospital ships work on the seriously wounded and
the revivable dead. By the time Kassad and the other
patients reached the Worldweb, they would be ready for
active duty. More importantly, Kassad would have accrued a
time-debt of at least eighteen standard months and
whatever controversy surrounded him might well be over by
that time.

Kassad awoke to see the dark shape of a woman bending
over him. For a second he was sure that it was she, and then
he realized that it was a FORCE medic.

“Am | dead?” he whispered.

“You were. You're on the HS Merrick. You've been through
resuscitation and renewal several times but you probably
don’t remember because of the fugue hangover. We’re ready
to start the next step in physical therapy. Do you feel like
trying to walk?”

Kassad lifted his arm to cover his eyes. Even through the
disorientation of fugue state, he now remembered the
painful therapy sessions, the long hours in the RNA virus
baths, and the surgery. Most of all the surgery. “What’s our
route?” he asked, still shielding his eyes. “I forget how we're
getting back to the Web.”

The medic smiled as if this were a question he asked each
time he came out of fugue. Perhaps it was. “We'll be putting
in at Hyperion and Garden,” she said. “We’re just entering
the orbit of ...”

The woman was interrupted by the sound of the end of the
world—great brass trumpets blowing, metal ripping, furies
screaming. Kassad rolled off the bed, wrapping the mattress
around him as he fell in the one-sixth g. Hurricane winds slid
him across the deck and hurled pitchers, trays, bedclothes,

books, bodies, metal instruments, and countless other
objects at him. Men and women were screaming, their voices
rising through falsetto as the air rushed out of the ward.
Kassad felt the mattress slam into the wall; he looked out
between clenched fists.

A meter from him, a football-sized spider with wildly
waving legs was trying to force itself into a crack which had
suddenly appeared in the bulkhead. The thing’s jointless
legs seemed to be swatting at the paper and other detritus
whirling around it. The spider rotated and Kassad realized
that it was the head of the medic; she had been decapitated
in the initial explosion. Her long hair writhed at Kassad’s
face. Then the crack widened to the width of a fist and the
head disappeared through it.

Kassad pulled himself up just as the boom arm quit
spinning and “up” ceased to be. The only forces now in play
were the hurricane winds still flinging everything in the
ward toward the cracks and gaps in the bulkhead and the
sickening lurch and tumble of the ship. Kassad swam against
it all, pulling himself toward the door to the boom-arm
corridor, using every handhold he could find, kicking free
the last five meters. A metal tray struck him above the eye;
a corpse with hemorrhaged eyes almost tumbled him back
into the ward. The airtight emergency doors were slamming
uselessly into a dead Marine whose spacesuited body
blocked the seal from closing. Kassad rolled through into the
boom-arm shaft and pulled the corpse after him. The door
sealed behind him, but there was no more air in the shaft
than there had been in the ward. Somewhere a claxon’s
scream thinned to inaudibility.

Kassad also screamed, trying to relieve the pressure so
that his lungs and eardrums would not burst. The boom arm
was still draining air; he and the corpse were being sucked
the hundred and thirty meters to the main body of the ship.
He and the dead Marine tumbled along the boom-arm shaft
in a grisly waltz.

It took Kassad twenty seconds to slap open the emergency
releases on the Marine’s suit, another minute to eject the
man’s corpse and to get his own body in. He was at least ten
centimeters taller than the dead man, and although the suit
was built to allow some expansion, it still pinched painfully
at his neck and wrists and knees. The helmet squeezed his
forehead like a cushioned vise. Gobbets of blood and a moist
white material clung to the inside of the visor. The piece of
shrapnel which had killed the Marine had left entrance and
exit holes, but the suit had done its best to seal itself Most of
the chest lights were red and the suit did not respond when
Kassad ordered it to give a status report, but the rebreather
worked, although with a worrying rasp.

Kassad tried the suit radio. Nothing, not even background
static. He found the comlog lead, jacked into a hull termex.
Nothing. The ship pitched again then, metal reverberating to
a succession of blows, and Kassad was thrown against the
wall of the boom-arm shaft. One of the transport cages
tumbled by, its severed cables whipping like the tentacles of
an agitated sea anemone. There were corpses in the cage
and more bodies tangled along the segments of Spiral
staircase still intact along the shaft wall. Kassad kicked the
remaining distance to the end of the shaft and found all of
the airtight doors there sealed, the boom-arm shaft itself
irised shut, but there were holes in the primary bulkhead
large enough to drive a commercial EMV through.

The ship lurched again and began to tumble more wildly,
imparting complex new Coriolis forces to Kassad and
everything else in the shaft. Kassad hung on torn metal and
pulled himself through a rent in the triple hull of the HS
Merrick.

He almost laughed when he saw the interior. Whoever had
lanced the old hospital ship had done it right, chopping and
stabbing the hull with CPBs until pressure seals failed, self-
seal units ruptured, damage-control remotes overloaded,
and the interior bulkheads collapsed. Then the enemy ship

had put missiles into the guts of the hulk with warheads of
what the FORCE:space people quaintly called cannister shot.
The effect had been quite similar to setting off an
antipersonnel grenade in a crowded rat maze.

Lights shone through a thousand holes, here and there
becoming colorful rays where they found a colloidal base in
floating haze of dust or blood or lubricant. From where
Kassad hung, twisting with the lurch and tumble of the ship,
he could see a score or more of bodies, naked and torn, each
moving with the deceptive underwater-ballet grace bt the
zero-gravity dead. Most of the corpses floated within their
own small solar systems of blood and tissue. Several of them
watched Kassad with the cartoon-character stares of their
pressure-expanded eyes and seemed to beckon him closer
with random, languid movements of arms and hands.

Kassad kicked through the wreckage to reach the main
dropshaft to the command core. He had seen no weapons—it
seemed that no one except the Marine had managed to suit
up—but he knew that there would be a weapons locker in
the command core or in the Marine quarters aft.

Kassad stopped at the last torn pressure seal and stared.
He did laugh this time. Beyond this point there was no main
dropshaft, no aft section. There was no ship. This section—a
boom-arm and medical ward mod, a ragged chunk of the
hull—had been ripped free of the ship as easily as Beowulf
had torn the arm from Grendel’s body. The final, unsealed
doorway to the dropshaft led to open space. Some
kilometers away, Kassad could see a dozen other ravaged
fragments of the HS Merrick tumbling in the glare of
sunlight. A green and lapis planet loomed so close that
Kassad felt a surge of acrophobia and clung more tightly to
the doorframe. Even as he watched, a star moved above the
limb of the planet, laser weapons winked their ruby morse,
and a gutted ship section half a kilometer away across the
gulf of vacuum from Kassad burst again in a gout of

vaporized metal, freezing volatiles, and tumbling black
specks which Kassad realized were bodies.

Kassad pulled himself deeper into the concealing tangle of
wreckage and considered his situation. The Marine’s suit
could not last more than another hour—already Kassad
could smell the rotten-eggs stench of the malfunctioning
rebreather—and he had seen no airtight compartment or
container during his struggle through the wreckage. And
even if he found a closet or airlock to shelter in, what then?
Kassad did not know if the planet below was Hyperion or
Garden, but he was sure that there was no FORCE presence
on either world. He was also quite sure that no local defense
forces would challenge an Ouster warship. It would be days
before any patrol craft investigated the wreckage. It was
quite possible, Kassad knew, that the orbit of the tumbling
piece of junk he now inhabited would decay before they sent
anyone up to check on it, sending thousands of tons of
twisted metal burning through the atmosphere. The locals
would not like that, Kassad knew, but from their point of
view it might be preferable to let a bit of sky fall than to
antagonize the Ousters. If the planet had primitive orbital
defenses or ground-based CPBs, he realized with a grim
smile, it would make more sense for them to blast the
wreckage than to fire on the Ouster ship.

It would make no difference to Kassad. Unless he did
something quickly, he would be dead long before the
remnants of the ship entered atmosphere or the locals took
action.

The Marine’s amplification shield had been cracked by the
shrapnel which had killed him, but now Kassad tugged what
was left of the viewplate down over the visor. Telltales
winked red but there was still enough suit power to show the
amplified view glowing pale green through the spiderweb of
cracks. Kassad watched as the Ouster torchship stood off a
hundred klicks, its defense fields blurring background stars,
and launched several objects. For an instant Kassad was

sure that these were the coup de grace missiles and he
found himself grinning joylessly at the certainty of having
only a few seconds to live. Then he noticed their low velocity
and notched the amplification higher. The power lights
blinked red and the amplifier failed, but not before Kassad
had seen the tapering ovoid shapes, spotted with thrusters
and cockpit blisters, each trailing a tangle of six jointless
manipulator arms. “Squids,” the FORCE:space people had
called the Ouster boarding craft.

Kassad pulled himself farther back in the wreckage. He
had only a few minutes before one or more of the squids
reached his piece of the ship. How many Ousters would one
of those things carry? Ten? Twenty? Kassad was sure that it
would be no fewer than ten. And they would be well armed
and rigged with infrared and motion sensors. The elite
Ouster equivalent of Hegemony Space Marines, the
commandos would not only have been trained for free-fall
combat but had been born and bred to zero g. Their long
limbs, prehensile toes, and prosthetic tails would be added
advantages for this environment, although Kassad doubted
that they needed any more advantages than they already
had.

He began to pull himself carefully back through the
labyrinth of twisted metal, fighting the adrenaline fear-surge
that made him want to kick off screaming through the
darkness. What did they want? Prisoners. That would solve
his immediate survival problem. All he had to do to survive
was surrender. The difficulty with that solution was that
Kassad had seen the FORCE:intelligence holos of the Ouster
ship they had captured off Bressia. There had been more
than two hundred prisoners in the storage bay of that ship.
And the Ousters obviously had many questions for these
Hegemony citizens. Perhaps they had found it inconvenient
to feed and imprison so many—or perhaps it was their basic
interrogation policy—but the fact was that the Bressian
civilians and captured FORCE troops had been found flayed

open and pinned down on steel trays like frogs in a biology
lab, their organs bathed with nutrient fluids, arms and legs
efficiently amputated, eyes removed, and their minds
readied for interrogators’ questions with crude cortical
comtaps and shunt-plugs jacked directly through three-
centimeter holes in the skulls.

Kassad pulled himself along, floating through debris and
the tangled entrails of the ship’s wiring. He felt no
inclination whatsoever to surrender. The tumbling hulk
vibrated and then steadied some as at least one of the
squids attached itself to the hull or bulkhead. Think, Kassad
commanded. He needed a weapon more than a hiding place.
Had he seen anything during his crawl through the
wreckage that would help him survive?

Kassad stopped moving and hung from an exposed section
of fiberoptic cable while he thought. The medical ward
where he had awakened, beds, fugue tanks, intensive care
apparatus ... most of it expelled through the breaches in the
spinmod’s hull. Boom-arm shaft, elevator cage, corpses on
the stairs. No weapons. Most of the bodies had been stripped
by the cannister shot explosions or sudden decompression.
The elevator cables? No, too long, impossible to sever
without tools. Tools? He had seen none. The medical offices
flayed open along the corridors beyond the main dropshaft.
Medical imaging rooms, MRI tanks, and CPD bays flung open
like looted sarcophagi. At least one operating room intact, its
interior a maze of scattered instruments and floating cables.
The solarium, scraped clean when the windows exploded
outward. Patient lounges. Medics’ lounges. The scrub rooms,
corridors, and unidentifiable cubicles. The corpses.

Kassad hung there a second longer, oriented himself in the
tumbling maze of light and shadow, and then kicked off.

He had hoped for ten minutes; he was given less than
eight. He knew that the Ousters would be methodical and
efficient but had underestimated how efficient they could be
in zero-g. He gambled his life that there would be at least

two of them on each sweep—basic Space Marine procedure,
much as FORCE:ground jump rats had learned to go door to
door in city fighting, one to burst into each room, the other
to provide cover fire. If there were more than two, if the
Ousters worked in squads of four, Kassad almost certainly
would be dead.

He was floating in the middle of Operating Room 3 when
the Ouster came through the door. Kassad’s rebreather had
all but failed, he was floating immobile, gasping foul air, as
the Ouster commando swung in, swung aside, and brought
his two weapons to bear on the unarmed figure in a battered
Marine spacesuit.

Kassad had bargained that the gruesome condition of his
suit and visor would gain him a second or two. Behind his
gore-smeared faceplate, Kassad’s eyes stared sightlessly
upward as the Ouster’s chestlight swept across him. The
commando carried two weapons—a sonic stunner in one
hand and a smaller but much more lethal tightbeam pistol in
the long toes of his left “foot.” He raised the sonic. Kassad
had time to notice the killing spike on the prosthetic tail and
then he triggered the mouse in his gauntleted right hand.

It had taken Kassad most of his eight minutes to tie in the
emergency generator to the operating-room circuits. Not all
of the surgery lasers had survived, but six still worked.
Kassad had positioned four of the smaller ones to cover the
area just to the left of the doorway, the two bone-cutters to
target the space to the right. The Ouster had moved to the
right.

The Ouster’s suit exploded. The lasers continued to slice
away in their preprogrammed circles as Kassad propelled
himself forward, ducking under the blue beams now swirling
in a spreading mist of useless suit sealant and boiling blood.
He wrested the sonic away just as the second Ouster swung
into the room, agile as an Old Earth chimp.

Kassad pressed the sonic against the man’s helmet and
fired. The suited figure went limp. The prosthetic tail

Spasmed a few times from random nerve impulses.
Triggering the sonic that close was no way to take a
prisoner; a burst from that distance turned a human brain
into something resembling oatmeal mush. Kassad did not
want to take a prisoner.

He kicked free, grabbed a girder, swept the active sonic
across the open doorway. No one else came through. A check
twenty seconds later showed an empty corridor.

Kassad ignored the first body and stripped the man with
the intact suit. The commando was naked under the
Spacesuit and it turned out not to be a man; the female
commando had short-cropped blond hair, small breasts, and
a tattoo just above her line of pubic hair. She was very pale
and droplets of blood floated from her nose, ears, and eyes.
Kassad made a note that the Ousters used women in their
Marines. All of the Ouster bodies on Bressia had been male.

He kept his helmet and rebreather pack on as he kicked
the body aside and tugged on the unfamiliar suit. Vacuum
exploded blood vessels in his flesh. Deep cold nipped at him
as he struggled with strange clasps and locks. Tall as he was,
he was too short for the woman’s suit. He could operate the
hand gauntlets by stretching, but the foot gloves and tail
connections were hopeless. He let them hang useless as he
bailed out of his own helmet and wrestled the Ouster bubble
into place.

Lights in the collar diskey glowed amber and violet.
Kassad heard the rush of air through aching eardrums and
almost gagged as a thick, rich stench assailed him. He
assumed it was the sweet smell of home to an Ouster.
Earphone patches in the bubble whispered coded
commands in a language which sounded like an audio tape
of Ancient English played backward at high speed. Kassad
was gambling again, this time on the fact that Ouster
ground units on Bressia had functioned as semi-independent
teams united by voice radio and basic telemetry rather than
a FORCE:ground type of tactical implant web. If they used

the same system here, then the commando leader might
know that two of his (or her) troops were missing, possibly
even have medcom readings on them, but might not know
exactly where they were.

Kassad decided that it was time to quit hypothesizing and
to get moving. He programmed the mouse to have the
surgical lasers fire on anything entering the operating room,
and then bounce-stumbled his way down the corridor.
Moving in one of these damn suits, he thought, was like
trying to walk in a gravity field while standing on your own
trousers. He had brought along both energy pistols and—
finding no belt, lockrings, hooks, Velcro pads, magclamps, or
pockets to secure them with—now floated along like some
drunken holodrama pirate, a weapon in each hand,
bouncing from wall to wall. Reluctantly, he left one pistol
floating behind him while he tried to hook himself along
one-handed. The gauntlet fit like a size fifteen mitten on a
size two hand. The damned tail wobbled, banged against his
helmet bubble, and was a literal pain in the ass.

Twice he squeezed into crevices when he saw lights in the
distance. He was just about to the deck opening where he
had watched the squid approach when he rounded a corner
and almost floated into three Ouster commandos.

The fact that he was wearing an Ouster suit gave him at
least a two-second advantage. He shot the first suited figure
in the helmet at point-blank range. The second man—or
woman—fired a wild sonic burst past Kassad’s left shoulder a
second before he put three bolts into the Ouster’s
chestplate. The third commando flipped backward, found
three handholds, and was out of sight around a broken
bulkhead before Kassad could retarget. His headset rang
with curses, commands, and questions. Kassad gave silent
chase.

The third Ouster would have escaped if he had not
rediscovered honor and turned to fight. Kassad felt an

inexplicable sense of déja vu as he put an energy bolt
through the man’s left eye from five meters away.

The corpse tumbled backward into sunlight. Kassad pulled
himself to the opening and stared at the squid moored not
twenty meters away. It was, he thought, the first undiluted
piece of luck he had had in some time.

He kicked across the gap, knowing that if someone wanted
to shoot him from the squid or the wreckage there was
nothing he could do about it. He felt the scrotum-lifting
tension he always experienced when he was an obvious
target. No shots were fired. Commands and interrogatives
squawked in his ears. He could not understand them, did not
know where they originated, and, on the whole, thought it
best if he stayed out of the dialogue.

The clumsiness of the suit almost caused him to miss the
squid. He thought briefly that such an anticlimax would be
the universe’s fitting verdict on his martial pretensions: the
brave warrior floating off into near-planet orbit, no
maneuvering systems, no propellant, no reaction mass of
any sort—even the pistol was nonrecoil. He would end his
life as useless and harmless as a child’s runaway balloon.

Kassad stretched until his joints popped, caught a whip
antenna, and pulled himself hand over hand to the squid’s
hull.

Where the hell was the airlock? The hull was relatively
smooth for a spacefaring vessel but was decorated with a
riot of designs, decals, and panels announcing what he
assumed were the Ouster equivalents of NO STEP and
DANGER: THRUSTER PORT. No entrances were visible. He
guessed that there were Ousters on board, a pilot at least,
and that they were probably wondering why their returning
commando was crawling around the hull like a spavined
crab rather than cycling the airlock. Or perhaps they knew
why and were waiting inside with drawn pistols. At any rate,
it was obvious that no one was going to open the door for
him.

The hell with it, thought Kassad and shot out one of the
observation blisters.

The Ousters kept a tidy ship. Not much more than the
equivalent of a few lost paper clips and coins geysered out
with the ship’s air. Kassad waited until the eruption had died
down and squeezed through the gap.

He was in the carrier section: a cushioned hold looking a
lot like the jump rat bay of any dropship or APC. Kassad
made a mental note that a squid probably held about twenty
Ouster commandos in full vacuum combat gear. Now it was
empty. An open hatch led to the cockpit.

Only the command pilot had remained on board and he
was in the final process of unbelting when Kassad shot him.
Kassad pushed the body into the carrier section and
strapped himself into what he hoped was the command
chair.

Warm sunlight came through the blister above him. Video
monitors and console holos showed scenes from dead ahead,
astern, and shoulder-camera glimpses of the search
operation inside. Kassad caught a glimpse of the nude body
in Operating Room 3 and several figures in a firelight with
surgical lasers.

In the holodramas of Fedmahn Kassad’s childhood, heroes
always seemed to know how to operate skimmers,
Spacecraft, exotic EMVs, and other strange machinery
whenever the need arose. Kassad had been trained to
handle military transports, simple tanks and APCs, even an
assault boat or dropship if he was desperate. If stranded on a
runaway FORCE spacecraft, a remote possibility, he could
find his way around the command core sufficiently to
communicate with the primary computer or put out a
distress call on a radio or fatline transmitter. Sitting in the
command chair of an Ouster squid, Kassad did not have a
clue.

That was not quite true. He immediately recognized the
remote grip slots for the squid’s tentacle manipulators, and

given two or three hours of thought and inspection, he
might have figured out several other controls. He did not
have the time. The forward screen showed three spacesuited
figures jumping for the squid, firing as they came. The pale,
oddly alien head of an Ouster commander suddenly
materialized on the holo console. Kassad heard shouts from
his bubble earpatches.

Globules of sweat hung in front of his eyes and streaked
the inside of his helmet. He shook them away as best he
could, squinted at the control consoles, and pushed several
likely-looking surfaces. If there were voice command circuits,
override controls, or a suspicious ship’s computer, Kassad
knew, he was screwed. He had thought of all this in the
second or two before he shot the pilot but had not been able
to think of a way to coerce or trust the man. No, this had to
be the way, thought Kassad even as he tapped more control
surfaces.

A thruster began firing.

The squid pulled and tugged at its moorings. Kassad
bounced back and forth in his webbing. “Shit,” he
whispered, his first audible comment since he had asked the
FORCE medic where the ship was putting in. He strained far
enough forward to get his gauntleted fingers into the grip
slots. Four of the six manipulators released. One ripped off.
The final one tore away a chunk of bulkhead from the HS
Merrick.

The squid tumbled free. Video cameras showed two of the
space-suited figures missing their jumps, the third clutching
at the same whip antenna which had saved Kassad. Knowing
roughly where the thruster controls were now, Kassad
tapped in a frenzy. An overhead light came on. All of the
holo projectors went dead. The squid commenced a
maneuver which incorporated all of the most violent
elements of pitch, roll, and yaw. Kassad saw the spacesuited
form tumble past the overhead blister, appear briefly on the
forward video screen, become a speck on the aft screen. The

Ouster was still firing energy bolts as he—or she—became
too small to see.

Kassad struggled to stay conscious as the violent tumbling
continued. Various voice and visual alarms were screaming
for his attention. Kassad tapped at thruster controls,
considered it a success, and pulled his hands away when he
felt as if he were being pulled apart in only two directions
rather than five.

A random camera shot showed him that the torchship was
receding. Good. Kassad had no doubt that the Ouster
warship could destroy him at any second, and that it would
if he approached or threatened it in any way. He did not
know if the squid was armed, personally doubted if it would
carry anything larger than antipersonnel weapons, but he
knew beyond a doubt that no torchship commander would
allow an out-of-control shuttlecraft to come anywhere near
his ship. Kassad assumed that the Ousters all knew by now
that the squid had been hijacked by the enemy. He would
not be surprised—disappointed, but not surprised—if the
torchship vaporized him at any second, but in the meantime
he was counting on two emotions that were quintessentially
human if not necessarily Ouster human: curiosity and the
desire for revenge.

Curiosity, he knew, could easily be overridden in times of
stress, but he counted on a paramilitary, semifeudal culture
like the Ousters’ to be deeply involved with revenge.
Everything else being equal, with no chance to hurt them
further and almost no chance to escape, it would seem that
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had become a prime candidate for
one of their dissection trays. He hoped so.

Kassad looked at the forward video display, frowned, and
loosened his harness long enough to look out the overhead
blister. The ship was tumbling but not nearly so violently as
before. The planet seemed closer—one hemisphere filled the
view “above” him—but he had no idea how close the squid
was to atmosphere. He could read none of the data displays.

He could only guess what their orbital velocity had been and
how violent a reentry shock would be. His one long glimpse
from the wreckage of the Merrick had suggested to Kassad
that they were very close, perhaps only five or six hundred
klicks above the surface, and in the kind of parking orbit
which he knew preceded the launching of dropships.

Kassad tried to wipe his face and frowned when the tips of
loose gauntlet fingers tapped at his visor. He was tired. Hell,
only a few hours earlier he had been in fugue and just a few
ship-weeks before that he had almost certainly been body-
dead.

He wondered if the world below was Hyperion or Garden;
he had been to neither but knew that Garden was more
widely settled, closer to becoming a Hegemony colony. He
hoped it was Garden.

The torchship launched three assault boats. Kassad saw
them clearly before the aft camera panned beyond range.
He tapped at the thruster controls until it felt as though the
ship was tumbling more quickly toward the wall of planet
above. There was little else he could do.

The squid reached atmosphere before the three Ouster
assault boats reached the squid. The boats undoubtedly
were armed and well within range, but someone on the
command circuit must have been curious. Or furious.

Kassad’s squid was in no way aerodynamic. As with most
Ship-to-ship craft, the squid could flirt with planetary
atmospheres but was doomed if it dove too deeply into the
gravity well. Kassad saw the telltale red glow of reentry,
heard the ion buildup on the active radio channels, and
suddenly wondered if this had been such a good idea.

Atmospheric drag stabilized the squid and Kassad felt the
first tentative tug of gravity as he searched the console and
the command chair arms for the control circuit he prayed
would be there. A staticfilled video screen showed one of the

dropships growing a blue-plasma tail as it decelerated. The
illusion created was similar to that encountered when one
Skydiver watched another open his chute or activate his
suspension rig; the assault boat seemed to climb suddenly.

Kassad had other things to worry about. There seemed to
be no obvious bail-out control, no ejection apparatus. Every
FORCE:space shuttle carried some sort of atmospheric
egress device—it was a custom dating back almost eight
centuries to when the entire realm of space flight consisted
only of tentative excursions just above the skin of Old
Earth’s atmosphere. A ship-to-ship shuttle probably would
never need a planetary bail-out device, but age-old fears
written into ancient regulations tended to die hard.

Or so the theory went. Kassad could find nothing. The ship
was quaking now, spinning, and beginning to heat up in
earnest. Kassad slapped open his harness release and pulled
himself toward the rear of the squid, not even sure what he
was looking for. Suspension packs? Parachutes? A set of
wings?

There was nothing in the troop carrier section except the
corpse of the Ouster pilot and a few storage compartments
not much larger than lunchboxes. Kassad tore through them,
finding nothing bigger than a medkit. No miracle devices.

Kassad could hear the squid shaking and beginning to
break up as he hung on a pivot ring and all but accepted the
fact that the Ousters had not wasted money or space on
such low-probability rescue devices for their squids. Why
should they? Their lifetimes were spent in the darknesses
between star systems; their concept of an atmosphere was
the eight-klick pressurized tube of a can city. The external
audio sensors on Kassad’s bubble helmet began to pick up
the raging hiss of air on the hull and through the broken
blister in the aft section. Kassad shrugged. He had gambled
too many times and lost.

The squid shuddered and bounced. Kassad could hear the
manipulator tentacles tearing away from the bow. The

Ouster’s corpse suddenly was sucked up and out of the
broken blister like an ant into a vacuum cleaner. Kassad
clung to the pivot ring and stared through the open hatch at
the control seats in the cockpit. It struck him that they were
wonderfully archaic, like something out of a textbook of the
earliest spacecraft. Parts of the ship’s exterior were burning
away now, roaring past the observation blisters like gobbets
of lava. Kassad closed his eyes and tried to remember
lectures from Olympus Command School on the structure
and layout of ancient spacegoing craft. The squid began a
terminal tumble. The noise was incredible.

“By Allah!” gasped Kassad, a cry he had not uttered since
childhood. He began pulling himself forward into the
cockpit, bracing himself on the open hatch, finding
handholds on the deck as if he were climbing a vertical wall.
He was climbing a wall. The squid had spun, stabilized in a
stern-first death dive. Kassad climbed under a 3-g load,
knowing that a single slip would break every bone in his
body. Behind him, atmospheric hiss turned to a scream and
then to a dragon roar. The troop carrier section was burning
through in fierce, molten explosions.

Climbing into the command seat was like negotiating a
rock overhang with the weight of two other climbers
swinging from his back. The clumsy gauntlets made his grip
on the headrest even less sure as Kassad hung over the
vertical drop to the flaming cauldron of the carrier section.
The ship lurched, Kassad swung his legs up, and he was in
the command seat. The display videos were dead. Flame
heated the overhead blister to a sick red. Kassad almost lost
consciousness as he bent forward, his fingers feeling in the
darkness below the command seat, between his knees.
There was nothing. Wait ... a handgrip. No, sweet Christ and
Allah ... a D-ring. Something out of the history books.

The squid began to break up. Overhead, the blister burned
through and spattered liquid Perspex throughout the interior
of the cockpit, splashing Kassad’s suit and visor. He smelled

plastic melting. The squid was spinning as it broke up.
Kassad’s sight turned pink, dimmed, was gone. He used
numb fingers to tighten the harness ... tighter ... either it
was cutting into his chest or the Perspex had burned
through. His hand went back to the D-ring. Fingers too
clumsy to close around it ... no. Pull.

Too late. The squid flew apart in a final screech and
explosion of flame, the control console tearing through the
cockpit in ten thousand shrapnel-sized bits.

Kassad was slammed into his seat. Up. Out. Into the heart
of the flame.

Tumbling.

Kassad was dimly aware that the seat was projecting its
own containment field as it tumbled. Flame was centimeters
from his face.

Pyrobolts fired, kicking the ejection seat out of the squid’s
blazing slipstream. The command seat made its own track of
blue flame across the sky. Microprocessors spun the seat so
that the disc of the forcefield was between Kassad and the
furnace of friction. A giant sat on Kassad’s chest as he
decelerated across two thousand kilometers of sky at eight
gravities.

Kassad forced his eyelids open once, noted that he lay
curled in the belly of a long column of blue-white flame, and
then he closed his eyes again. He saw no sign of a control for
a parachute, suspension pack, or any other braking device.
It didn’t matter. He could not move his arms or hands in any
case.

The giant shifted, grew heavier.

Kassad realized that part of his helmet bubble had melted
or been blown away. The noise was indescribable. It didn’t
matter.

He closed his eyes more tightly. It was a good time to take
a nap.

Kassad opened his eyes and saw the dark shape of a
woman bending over him. For a second he thought it was
her. He looked again and realized that it was her. She
touched his cheek with cool fingers.

“Am | dead?” whispered Kassad, raising his own hand to
grip her wrist.

“No.” Her voice was soft and throaty, burred with the hint
of an accent he could not place. He had never heard her
speak before.

“You're real?”

“Yes.”

Kassad sighed and looked around. He lay naked under a
thin robe on some sort of couch or platform set in the middle
of a dark, cavernous room. Overhead, starlight was visible
through a broken roof. Kassad raised his other hand to touch
her shoulder. Her hair was a dark nimbus above him. She
wore a loose, thin gown which—even in the starlight—
allowed him to see the outlines of her body. He caught her
scent, the fragrant hint of soap and skin and her that he
knew so well from their other times together.

“You must have questions,” she whispered as Kassad
released the gold clasp which held her gown in place. The
gown whispered to the floor. She wore nothing underneath.
Above them, the band of the Milky Way was clearly visible.

“No,” said Kassad and pulled her to him.

Toward morning a breeze arose, but Kassad pulled the
light cover over them. The thin material seemed to preserve
all of their body heat and they lay together in perfect
warmth. Somewhere sand or snow rasped at bare walls. The
stars were very clear and very bright.

They awoke at the first hint of dawn, their faces close
together under the silken coverlet. She ran her hand down
Kassad’s side, finding old and recent scars.

“Your name?” whispered Kassad.

“Hush,” she whispered back, her hand sliding lower.

Kassad moved his face into the scented curve of her neck.
Her breasts were soft against him. Night paled to morning.
Somewhere sand or snow blew against bare walls.

They made love, slept, made love again. In full light they
rose and dressed. She had laid out underwear, gray tunic
and trousers for Kassad. They fit perfectly, as did the
spongesocks and soft boots. The woman wore a similar outfit
of navy blue.

“Your name?” Kassad asked as they left the building with
the shattered dome and walked through a dead city.

“Moneta,” said his dream, “or Mnemosyne, whichever
name pleases you more,”

“Moneta,” whispered Kassad. He looked up at a small sun
rising into a lapis sky. “This is Hyperion?”

“Yes.”

“How did | land? Suspensor field? Parachute?”

“You descended under a wing of gold foil.”

“I don’t hurt. There were no wounds?”

“They were tended to.”

“What is this place?”

“The City of Poets. Abandoned more than a hundred years
ago. Beyond that hill lie the Time Tombs.”

“The Ouster assault boats that were following me?”

“One landed nearby. The Pain Lord took the crew unto
himself. The other two set down some distance away.”

“Who is the Pain Lord?”

“Come,” said Moneta. The dead city ended in desert. Fine
sand slid across white marble half buried in dunes. To the
west an Ouster dropship sat with its portals irised open.
Nearby, on a fallen column, a thermcube yielded hot coffee
and fresh-baked rolls. They ate and drank in silence.

Kassad worked to recall the legends of Hyperion. “The Pain
Lord is the Shrike,” he said at last.

“Of course.”

“You're from here ... from the City of Poets?”

Moneta smiled and slowly shook her head.

Kassad finished his coffee and set the cup down. The
feeling that he was in a dream persisted, much stronger
than during any sim he had ever participated in. But the
coffee had tasted pleasantly bitter; the sun was warm on his
face and hands.

“Come, Kassad,” said Moneta.

They crossed expanses of cold sand. Kassad found himself
glancing skyward, knowing that the Ouster torchship could
lance them from orbit ... then knowing with a sudden
certainty that it would not.

The Time Tombs lay in a valley. A low obelisk glowed softly.
A stone sphinx seemed to absorb the light. A complex
structure of twisted pylons threw shadows onto itself. Other
tombs were silhouettes against the rising sun. Each of the
tombs had a door and each door was open. Kassad knew
that they had been open when the first explorers discovered
the Tombs and that the structures were empty. More than
three centuries of searching for hidden rooms, tombs, vaults,
and passageways had been fruitless.

“This is as far as you can go,” Moneta said as they neared
the cliff at the head of the valley. “The time tides are strong
today.”

Kassad’s tactical implant was silent. He had no comlog. He
searched his memory. “There are anti-entropic forcefields
around the Time Tombs,” he said.

“Yes.”

“The tombs are ancient. The anti-entropic fields keep them
from aging.”

“No,” said Moneta. “The time tides drive the Tombs
backward through time.”

“Backward through time,” Kassad repeated stupidly.

“Look.”

Shimmering, miragelike, a tree of steel thorns appeared
out of the haze and a sudden dust storm of ochre sand. The
thing seemed to fill the valley, rising at least two hundred
meters to the height of the cliffs. Branches shifted,
dissolved, and reformed like elements of a poorly tuned
hologram. Sunlight danced on five-meter-long thorns.
Corpses of Ouster men and women, all naked, were impaled
on at least a score of these thorns. Other branches held
other bodies. Not all were human.

The dust storm obscured the view for a moment and when
the winds subsided the vision was gone. “Come,” said
Moneta.

Kassad followed her through the fringes of the time tides,
avoiding the ebb and flow of the anti-entropic field the way
children would play tag with an ocean surf on a broad
beach. Kassad felt the pull of the time tides like waves of
déja vu tugging at every cell of his body.

Just beyond the entrance to the valley, where hills opened
to the dunes and low moors led to the City of Poets, Moneta
touched a wall of blue slate and an entrance opened to a
long, low room set into the cliff face.

“Is this where you live?” asked Kassad but saw
immediately that there were no signs of habitation. The
stone walls of the room were inset with shelves and crowded
niches.

“We must ready ourselves,” whispered Moneta and the
lighting shifted to a golden hue. A long rack lowered its
wares. A wafer-thin strip of reflective polymer curtained from
the ceiling to serve as a mirror.

Kassad watched with the calm passivity of a dreamer as
Moneta stripped off her clothes and then his. Their nudity
was no longer erotic, merely ceremonial.

“You have been in my dreams for years,” he told her.

“Yes. Your past. My future. The shock wave of events
moves across time like ripples on a pond.”

Kassad blinked as she raised a gold ferule and touched his
chest. He felt a slight shock and his flesh became a mirror,
his head and face a featureless ovoid reflecting all the color
tones and textures of the room. A second later Moneta
joined him, her body becoming a cascade of reflections,
water over quicksilver over chrome. Kassad saw his own
reflecting reflection in every curve and muscle of her body.
Moneta’s breasts caught and bent the light; her nipples rose
like small splashes on a mirrored pond. Kassad moved to
embrace her and felt their surfaces flow together like
magnetized fluid. Under the connected fields, his flesh
touched hers.

“Your enemies await beyond the city,” she whispered. The
chrome of her face flowed with light.

“Enemies?”

“The Ousters. The ones who followed you here.”

Kassad shook his head, saw the reflection do likewise.
“They’re not important anymore.”

“Oh, yes,” whispered Moneta, “the enemy is always
important. You must arm yourself.”

“With what?” But even as he spoke, Kassad realized that
she was touching him with a bronze sphere, a dull blue
toroid. His altered body spoke to him now as clearly as
troops reporting in on an implant command circuit. Kassad
felt the bloodlust build in him with turgid strength.

“Come.” Moneta led the way into open desert again. The
sunlight seemed polarized and heavy. Kassad felt that they
were gliding across the dunes, flowing like liquid through
the white marble Streets of the dead city. Near the west end
of town, near the shattered remnants of a structure still
bearing the inscribed lintel of Poets’ Amphitheatre,
something stood waiting.

For a second Kassad thought it was another person
wearing the chromium forcefields he and Moneta were
draped in—but only for a second. There was nothing human
about this particular quicksilver-over-chrome construct.

Kassad dreamily noted the four arms, retractable
fingerblades, the profusion of thornspikes on throat,
forehead, wrists, knees, and body, but not once did his gaze
leave the two thousand-faceted eyes which burned with a
red flame that paled sunlight and dimmed the day to blood
shadows.

The Shrike, thought Kassad.

“The Lord of Pain,” whispered Moneta.

The thing turned and led them out of the dead city.

Kassad approved of the way the Ousters had prepared their
defenses. The two assault boats were grounded less than
half a kilometer apart, their guns, projectors, and missile
turrets covering each other and a full three hundred and
sixty degrees of fire. Ouster ground troops had been busy
digging revetments a hundred meters out from the boats
and Kassad could see at least two EM tanks hull down, their
projection arrays and launch tubes commanding thp wide,
empty moor between the Poets’ City and the boats. Kassad’s
vision had been altered; he could see the overlapping ship
containment fields as ribbons of yellow haze, the motion
sensors and antipersonnel mines as eggs of pulsing red
light.

He blinked, realizing that something was wrong with the
image. Then it came to him: besides the thickness of the
light and his enhanced perception of energy fields, nothing
was moving. The Ouster troops, even those set in attitudes
of motion, were as stiff as the toy soldiers he had played
with as a boy in the Tharsis slums. The EM tanks were dug
into their hull-down positions, but Kassad noticed that now
even their acquisition radars—visible to him as concentric
purple arcs—were motionless. He glanced skyward and saw
some sort of large bird hanging in the sky, as unmoving as
an insect frozen in amber. He passed a cloud of windblown

dust hanging suspended, extended one chrome hand, and
flicked spirals of particles to the ground.

Ahead of them, the Shrike strode casually through the red
maze of sensor-mines, stepped over the blue lines of
tripbeams, ducked under the violet pulses of the autofire
scanners, passed through the yellow containment field and
the green wall of the sonic defense perimeter, and walked
into the assault boat’s shadow. Moneta and Kassad followed.

—How Is this possible? Kassad realized that he had posed
the question through a medium that was something less
than telepathy but something far more sophisticated than
implant conduction.

—He controls time.

—The Pain Lord?

— Of course.

—Why are we here?

Moneta gestured toward the motionless Ousters.— They
are your enemies.

Kassad felt that he was finally awaking from a long dream.
This was rea/. The Ouster trooper’s eyes, unblinking behind
his helmet, were rea/. The Ouster assault boat, rising like a
bronze tombstone to his left, was real.

Fedmahn Kassad realized that he could kill them all—
commandos, assault boat crew, a// of them—and they could
do nothing about it. He knew that time had not stopped—
any more than it stopped while a ship was under Hawking
drive—it was merely a matter of varying rates. The bird
frozen above them would complete the flap of its wings
given enough minutes or hours. The Ouster in front of him
would close his eyes in a blink if Kassad had the patience to
watch long enough. Meanwhile, Kassad and Moneta and the
Shrike could kill all of them without the Ousters realizing
that they were under attack.

It was not fair, Kassad realized. It was wrong. It was the
ultimate violation of the New Bushido, worse in its way than
the wanton murder of civilians. The essence of honor lay in

the moment of combat between equals. He was about to
communicate this to Moneta when she said/thought— Watch.

Time began again with an explosion of sound not unlike
the rush of air into an airlock. The bird soared and circled
overhead. A desert breeze threw dust against the static-
charged containment field. An Ouster commando rose from
one knee, saw the Shrike and the two human shapes,
screamed something over his tactical comm channel, and
raised his energy weapon.

The Shrike did not seem to move—to Kassad it merely
ceased being here and appeared there. The Ouster
commando emitted a second, shorter scream, and then
looked down in disbelief as the Shrike’s arm withdrew with
the man’s heart in its bladed fist. The Ouster stared, opened
his mouth as if to speak, and collapsed.

Kassad turned to his right and found himself face to face
with an armored Ouster. The commando ponderously lifted a
weapon. Kassad swung his arm, felt the chrome forcefield
hum, and saw the flat of his hand cut through body armor,
helmet, and neck. The Ouster’s head rolled in the dust.

Kassad leaped into a low trench and saw several troopers
begin to turn. Time was still out of joint; the enemy moved
in extreme slow motion one second, jerked like a damaged
holo to four-fifths speed in the next instant. They were never
as quick as Kassad. Gone were his thoughts of the New
Bushido. These were the barbarians who had tried to kill
him. He broke one man’s back, stepped aside, jabbed rigid,
chrome fingers through the body armor of a second man,
crushed the larynx of a third, dodged a knife blade moving
in slow motion and kicked the spine out of the knife wielder.
He leaped up out of the ditch.

—Kassad!

Kassad ducked as the laser beam crept past his shoulder,
burning its way through the air like a slow fuse of ruby light.
Kassad smelled ozone as it crackled past. /mpossible. I’ve
dodged a laser! He picked up a stone and flung it at the

Ouster manning the tank-mounted hellwhip. A sonic boom
cracked; the gunner exploded backward. Kassad pulled a
plasma grenade from a corpse’s bandolier, leaped to the
tank hatch, was thirty meters away before the explosion
geysered flame as high as the assault boat’s bow.

Kassad paused in the eye of the storm to see Moneta in
the center of her own circle of carnage. Blood splashed her
but did not adhere, flowing like oil on water across the
rainbow curves of chin, shoulder, breast, and belly. She
looked at him across the battlefield and Kassad felt a
renewed surge of bloodlust in himself.

Behind her, the Shrike moved slowly through the chaos,
choosing victims as if he were harvesting. Kassad watched
the creature wink in and out of existence and realized that
to the Pain Lord he and Moneta would appear to be moving
as slowly as the Ousters did to Kassad.

Time jumped, moved to four-fifths speed. The surviving
troops were panicking now, firing into one another,
deserting their posts, and fighting to get aboard the assault
boat. Kassad tried to realize what the past minute or two had
been like for them: blurs moving through their defensive
positions, comrades dying in great gouts of blood. Kassad
watched Moneta moving through their ranks, killing at her
leisure. To his amazement, he discovered that he had some
control of time: blink and his opponents slowed to one-third
speed, blink and events moved at nearly their normal pace.
Kassad’s sense of honor and sanity called out for him to stop
the slaughter but his almost sexual bloodlust overpowered
any objections.

Someone in the assault boat had sealed the airlock and
now a terrified commando used a shaped plasma charge to
blow the portal open. The mob pressed in, trampling the
wounded in their flight from unseen killers. Kassad followed
them in.

The phrase “fight like a cornered rat” is an extremely apt
description. Throughout the history of military encounters,

human combatants have been known to fight at their
fiercest when challenged in enclosed places where flight is
not an option. Whether in the passageways of La Haye
Sainte and Hougoumont at Waterloo or in the Hive tunnels
of Lusus, some of the most terrible hand-to-hand battles in
history have been fought in cramped spaces where no
retreat is possible. It was true this day. The Ousters
fought ... and died ... like cornered rats.

The Shrike had disabled the assault boat. Moneta
remained outside to kill the threescore commandos who had
stayed at their posts. Kassad killed those within.

In the end, the final assault boat fired on its doomed
counterpart. Kassad was outside by then and he watched
the particle beams and high-intensity lasers creep toward
him, followed an eternity later by missiles which seemed to
move so slowly that he could have written his name on them
in flight. By that time all of the Ousters were dead in and
around the overrun boat, but its containment field held
Energy dispersion and impact explosions tossed corpses
around on the outer perimeter, set fire to equipment, and
glazed the sand to glass, but Kassad and Moneta watched
from inside a dome of orange flame as the remaining assault
boat retreated to space.

—Can we stop them? Kassad was panting, pouring sweat,
and literally quivering from excitement.

—We could, replied Moneta, but we do not want to. They
will carry the message to the swarm.

—What message?

“Come here, Kassad.”

He turned at the sound of her voice. The reflective
forcefield was gone. Moneta’s flesh was oiled with sweat; her
dark hair was matted against her temples; her nipples were
hard. “Come here.”

Kassad glanced down at himself. His own forcefield was
gone—he had willed it away—and he was more sexually
excited than he could ever remember being.

“Come here.” Moneta whispered this time.

Kassad went to her, lifted her, felt the sweat-slick
smoothness of her buttocks as he carried her to an empty
stretch of grass atop a wind-carved hummock. He lowered
her to the ground between piles of Ouster bodies, roughly
opened her legs, took both her hands in the grasp of one of
his, lifted her arms above her head, pinned them to the
ground, and lowered his long body between her legs.

“Yes,” whispered Moneta as he kissed the lobe of her left
ear, set his lips to the pulse at the hollow of her neck, licked
the salt tang of sweat from her breasts. Lying among the
dead. More dead to come. The thousands. The millions.
Laughter out of dead bellies. The long lines of troops
emerging from JumpShips to enter the waiting flames.

“Yes.” Her breath was hot in his ear. She freed her hands,
slid them along Kassad’s damp shoulders, trailed long nails
down his back, grasped his buttocks to pull him closer.
Kassad’s erection scraped her pubic hair, throbbed against
the cusp of her belly. Farcaster portals opening to admit the
cold lengths of attack carriers. The warmth of plasma
explosions. Hundreds of ships, thousands, dancing and
dying like dust motes in a whirlwind. Great columns of solid
ruby light lancing across great distances, bathing targets in
the ultimate surge of warmth, bodies boiling in red light.

“Yes.” Moneta opened her mouth and body to him. Warmth
above and below, her tongue in his mouth as he entered her,
welcomed by warm friction. His body strained deep, pulled
back slightly, allowed the moist warmth to engulf him
further as they began to move together. Heat on a hundred
worlds. Continents burning in bright spasms, the roll of
boding seas. The air itself aflame. Oceans of superheated air
swelling like warm skin rising to a lover’s touch.

“Yes ... yes ... yes.” Moneta breathes warmth against his
lips. Her skin is oil and velvet. Kassad thrusts quickly now,
the universe contracting as sensation expands, senses
dwindling as she closes warm and wet and tight around him.

Her hips thrust harshly in response now, as if sensing the
terrible build in pressure at the base of his being.
Demanding. Kassad grimaces, closes his eyes, sees ...

. fireballs expanding, stars dying, suns exploding in
great pulses of flame, star systems perishing in an ecstasy
of destruction ...

... he feels pain in his chest, his hips not stopping, moving
faster, even as he opens his eyes and sees ...

... the great thorn of steel rising from between Moneta’s
breasts, almost impaling him as he unconsciously pulls up
and back, the thornblade drawing blood which drips on her
flesh, her pale flesh, reflective now, flesh as cold as dead
metal, his hips still moving even as he watches through
passion-dimmed eyes as Moneta’s lips wither and curl back,
revealing rows of steel blades where teeth had been, metal
blades slash at his buttocks where fingers had gripped, legs
like powerful steel bands imprison his pumping hips, her
eyes ...

. in the last seconds before orgasm Kassad tries to pull
away ... his hands on her throat, pressing ... she clings like a
leech, a lamprey ready to drain him... they roll against dead
bodies ...

... her eyes like red jewels, blazing with a mad heat like
that which fills his aching testicles, expanding like a flame,
Spilling over...

... Kassad slams both hands against the soil, lifts himself
away from her ... from it ... his strength insane but not
enough as terrible gravities press them together ... sucking
like a lamprfey’s mouth as he threatens to explode, looks in
her eyes ... the death of worlds ... the death of worlds!

Kassad screams and pulls away. Strips of his flesh rip away
as he lunges up and sideways. Metal teeth click shut in a
steel vagina, missing his glans by a moist millimeter. Kassad
slumps on his side, rolls away, hips moving, unable to stop
his ejaculation. Semen explodes in streams, falls on the

curled fist of a corpse. Kassad moans, rolls again, curls in a
fetal position even as he comes again. And again.

He hears the hiss and rustle as she rises behind him.
Kassad rolls on his back and squints up against sunlight and
his own pain. She stands above him, legs apart, a silhouette
of thorns. Kassad wipes sweat from his eyes, sees his wrist
come away red with blood, and waits for the killing blow. His
skin contracts in anticipation of the slash of blade into flesh.
Panting, Kassad looks up to see Moneta above him, thighs
flesh rather than steel, her groin matted from the moisture of
their passion. Her face is dark, the sun behind her, but he
sees red flames dying in the multifaceted pits of her eyes.
She smiles and he sees sunlight glint on rows of metal teeth.
“Kassad ...” she whispers and it is the sound of sand
scraping against bone.

Kassad tears his gaze away, struggles to his feet, and
stumbles across corpses and burning rubble in his terror to
be free. He does not look back.

Scouting elements of Hyperion’s Self-defense Force found
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad almost two days later. He was
discovered lying unconscious on one of the grassy moors
which lead to the abandoned Chronos Keep, some twenty
kilometers from the dead city and the wreckage of the
Ouster ejection pod. Kassad was naked and almost dead
from the effects of exposure and several serious wounds, but
he responded well to emergency field treatment and was
immediately airlifted south of the Bridle Range to a hospital
at Keats. Reconnaissance squads from the SDF battalion
moved northward carefully, cautious of the anti-entropic
tides around the Time Tpmbs and wary of any booby traps
left behind by the Ousters. Thejre were none. The scouts
found only the wreckage of Kassad’s escape mechanism and
the burned-out hulk of the two assault boats which the
Ousters had lanced from orbit. There were no clues as to why

they had slagged their own ships and the Ouster bodies—
both in and around the boats—had been burned beyond any
hope of autopsy or analysis.

Kassad regained consciousness three Hyperion days later,
swore that he remembered nothing after stealing the squid,
and was shipped out on a FORCE torchship two local weeks
later.

Upon returning to the Web, Kassad_ resigned his
commission. For a while he was active in antiwar
movements, occasionally appearing on the All Thing net
arguing disarmament. But the attack on Bressia had
mobilized the Hegemony toward true interstellar war as had
nothing else in three centuries, and Kassad’s voice was
either drowned out or dismissed as the guilty conscience of
the Butcher of South Bressia.

In the sixteen years after Bressia, Colonel Kassad had
disappeared from the Web and from the Web consciousness.
Although there had been no more major battles, the Ousters
remained the Hegemony’s prime bogeymen. Fedmahn
Kassad was only a fading memory.

It was late morning when Kassad finished his story. The
Consul blinked and looked around him, noticing the ship and
its surroundings for the first time in more than two hours.
The Benares had come out into the main channel of the
Hoolie. The Consul could hear the creaks of the chains and
hawsers as the river mantas surged against their harnesses.
The Benares appeared to be the only ship heading upriver,
but now numerous small craft were visible going the other
way. The Consul rubbed his forehead and was surprised to
see his hand come away slick with sweat. The day had
grown very warm and the shadow of the tarp had crept away
from the Consul without his noticing. He blinked, wiped
sweat from his eyes, and moved into the shade to get a

drink from one of the liquor bottles the androids had set in a
cabinet near the table.

“My God,” Father Hoyt was saying, “so, according to this
Moneta creature, the Time Tombs are moving backward in
time?”

“Yes,” said Kassad.

“Is that possible?” asked Hoyt.

“Yes.” It was Sol Weintraub who answered.

“If thats true,” said Brawne Lamia, “then you ‘met’ this
Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but
your future ... in a meeting that’s still to come.”

“Yes,” said Kassad.

Martin Silenus walked to the railing and spat into the river.
“Colonel, do you think the bitch was the Shrike?”

“| don’t know.” Kassad’s monotone was barely audible.

Silenus turned to Sol Weintraub. “You’re a scholar. Is there
anything in the Shrike mythography that says the thing can
change shape?”

“No,” said Weintraub. He was preparing a milk globe to
feed his daughter. The infant made soft, mewling noises and
moved tiny fingers.

“Colonel,” said Het Masteen, “the forcefield ... whatever
the fighting suit was ... did you bring it with you after the
encounter with the Ousters and this ... female?”

Kassad looked at the Templar a moment and then shook
his head.

The Consul was staring into his drink but his head
suddenly snapped upright with the force of a thought.
“Colonel, you said that you saw a vision of the Shrike’s
killing tree ... the structure, the thing where it impales its
victims.”

Kassad moved his basilisk stare from the Templar to the
Consul. He slowly nodded.

“And there were bodies on it?”

Another nod.

The Consul wiped sweat from his upper lip. “If the tree is
traveling backward in time with the Time Tombs, then the
victims are from our future.”

Kassad said nothing. The others also were staring at the
Consul now but only Weintraub appeared to understand
what the comment meant ... and what the Consul’s next
question had to be.

The Consul resisted the urge to wipe the sweat from his lip
again. His voice was steady. “Did you see any of us there?”

Kassad said nothing for more than a minute. The soft
sounds of the river and the ship’s rigging suddenly seemed
very loud. Finally Kassad took a breath,. “Yes.”

Silence stretched again. Brawne Lamia broke it. “Will you
tell us who?”

“No.” Kassad rose and went to the stairway leading to the
lower decks.

“Wait,” called Father Hoyt.

Kassad paused at the head of the stairway.

“Will you at least tell us two other things?”

“What?”

Father Hoyt grimaced from a wave of pain. His gaunt face
went white under its film of perspiration. He took a breath
and said, “First, do you think the Shrike... the
woman ... somehow wants to use you to start this terrible
interstellar war you foresaw?”

“Yes,” Kassad said softly.

“Second, will you tell us what you plan to petition the
Shrike for ... or this Moneta ... when you meet them on the
pilgrimage?”

Kassad smiled for the first time. It was a thin smile, and
very, very cold. “I will make no petition,” said Kassad. “I will
ask nothing of them. When | meet them this time, | will kill
them.”

The other pilgrims did not speak or look at one another as
Kassad went below. The Benares continued north-northeast
into afternoon.

The barge Benares entered the river port of Naiad an hour
before sunset. Crew and pilgrims pressed to the rail to stare
at smoldering embers of what once had been a city of
twenty thousand people. Little remained. The famous River
Front Inn, built in the days of Sad King Billy, had burned to
the foundations; its charred docks, piers, and screened
balconies now collapsed into the shallows of the Hoolie. The
customhouse was a burned-out shell. The airship terminal on
the north end of town survived only as a blackened hulk, its
mooring tower reduced to a spire of charcoal. There was no
sign whatsoever of the small riverfront Shrike temple. Worst
of all, from the pilgrims’ point of view, was the destruction of
the Naiad River Station—the harness dock lay burned and
Sagging, the manta holding pens open to the river.

“God damn it!” said Martin Silenus.

“Who did it?” asked Father Hoyt. “The Shrike?”

“More likely the SDF,” said the Consul. “Although they may
have been fighting the Shrike.”

“I can’t believe this, snapped Brawne Lamia. She turned to
A. Bettik, who had just joined them on the rear deck. “Didn't
you know this had happened?”

“No,” said the android. “There has been no contact with
any point north of the locks for more than a week.”

“Why the hell not?” asked Lamia. “Even if this godforsaken
world doesn’t have a datasphere, don’t you have radio?”

A. Bettik smiled slightly. “Yes, M. Lamia, there is radio, but
the comsats are down, the microwave repeater stations at
the Karla Locks were destroyed, and we have no access to
shortwave.”

“What about the mantas?” asked Kassad. “Can we press
on to Edge with the ones we have?”

Bettik frowned. “We will have to, Colonel,” he said. “But it
is a crime. The two in harness will not recover from such a
pull. With fresh mantas we would have put into Edge before
dawn. With these two ...” The android shrugged. “With luck,
if the beasts survive, we will arrive by early afternoon....”

“The windwagon will still be there, will it not?” asked Het
Masteen.

“We must assume so,” said A. Bettik. “If you will excuse
me, | will see to feeding the poor beasts we have. We should
be under way again within the hour.”

They saw no one in or near the ruins of Naiad. No river
craft made their appearance above the city. An hour’s pull
northeast of the town they entered the region where the
forests and farms of the lower Hoolie gave way to the
undulating orange prairie south of the Sea of Grass.
Occasionally the Consul would see the mud towers of
architect ants, some of their serrated structures near the
river reaching almost ten meters in height. There was no
sign of intact human habitation. The ferry at Betty’s Ford
was totally gone, with not even a towrope or warming shack
left to show where it had stood for almost two centuries. The
River Runners Inn at Cave Point was dark and silent. A.
Bettik and other crew members hallooed, but there was no
response from the black cave mouth.

Sunset brought a sensuous stillness over the river, soon
broken by a chorus of insect noises and night-bird calls. For
a while the surface of the Hoolie became a mirror of the
gray-green disk of twilight sky, disturbed only by the leap of
dusk-feeding fish and the wake of the laboring mantas. As
true darkness fell, innumerable prairie gossamers—much
paler than their forest cousins, but also of greater wingspan,
luminescent shades the size of small children—danced in

the vales and valleys of the gently rolling hills. By the time
the constellations emerged and the meteor trails began
scarring the night sky, a brilliant display this far from all
man-made light, the lanterns had been lit and dinner set out
on the aft deck.

The Shrike pilgrims were subdued, as if still contemplating
Colonel Kassad’s grim and confusing tale. The Consul had
been drinking steadily since before midday and now he felt
the pleasant displacement—from reality, from the pain of
memory—which allowed him to get through each day and
night. Now he asked, his voice as careful and unslurred as
only a true alcoholic’s can be, whose turn it was to tell a tale.

“Mine,” said Martin Silenus. The poet also had been
drinking steadily since early in the day. His voice was as
carefully controlled as the Consul’s but redness on his sharp
cheeks and an almost manic brightness of eye gave the old
poet away. “At least | drew number three....” He held up his
Slip of paper. “If you still want to hear the fucking thing.”

Brawne Lamia lifted her glass of wine, scowled, and set it
down. “Perhaps we should talk about what we have learned
from the first two stories and how it might relate to our
Current ... situation.”

“Not yet,” said Colonel Kassad. “We don’t have enough
information.”

“Let M. Silenus speak,” said Sol Weintruab. “Then we can
begin discussing what we have heard.”

“| agree,” said Lenar Hoyt.

Het Masteen and the Consul nodded.

“Agreed!” cried Martin Silenus. “lIl tell my story. Just let
me finish my fucking glass of wine.”

THE POET’S TALE:
“HYPERION CANTOS”

[jr the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking
word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then
came the death of literature. And so it goes.

Francis Bacon once said, “There arises from a bad and
unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the
mind.” We have all contributed our wonderful obstructions
to the mind, have we not? | more than most. One of the
twentieth century’s better, forgotten writers—that is better-
comma-forgotten, once bon moted: “| love being a writer. It’s
the paperwork | can’t stand.” Get it? Well, amigos and
amigette, | love being a poet. It’s the goddamned words |
can’t stand.

Where to start?

Start with Hyperion perhaps?

(Fade in) Almost two standard centuries ago.

Sad King Billy’s five seedships spin like gold dandelions
above this all too familiar lapis sky. We land like
conquistadors strutting to and fro; more than two thousand
visual artists and writers and sculptors and poets and
ARNists and vid makers and holie directors and composers
and decomposers and God knows what all, supported by five
times that many administrators and technicians and
ecologists and supervisors and court chamberlains and
professional ass kissers, not to mention the family of royal
asses themselves, supposed in turn by ten times that many
androids willing to till the soil and stoke the reactors and
raise the cities and lift that bale and tote that load ... hell,
you get the idea.

We landed on a world already seeded by the poor buggers
who'd gone indigenie two centuries before and were living
hand to mouth and cudgel to brain wherever they could.
Naturally the noble descendants of these brave pioneers

greeted us like gods—especially after a few of our security
folk slagged a few of their more aggressive leaders—and
naturally we accepted their worship as our due and put
them to work next to our blueskins, plowing the south forty
and working to build our shining city on the hill.

And it was a shining city on a hill. Seeing the ruins today
can tell you nothing of the place. The desert has advanced
in three centuries; the aqgueducts from the mountains have
fallen and shattered; the city itself is only bones. But in its
day the City of Poets was fair indeed, a bit of Sokrates’s
Athens with the intellectual excitement of Renaissance
Venice, the artistic fervor of Paris in the days of the
Impressionists, the true democracy of the first decade of
Orbit City, and the unlimited future of Tau Ceti Center.

But, in the end, it was none of these things, of course. It
was only Hrothgar’s claustrophobic mead hall with the
monster waiting in the darkness without. We had our
Grendel, to be sure. We even had our Hrothgar if one squints
a bit at Sad King Billy’s poor slouched profile. We lacked
only our Geats; our great, broad-shouldered, small-brained
Beowulf with his band of merry psychopaths. So, lacking a
Hero, we settled into the role of victims and composed our
sonnets and rehearsed our ballets and unrolled our scrolls,
while all the while our thorn-and-steel Grendel served the
night with fear and harvested thighbones and gristle.

And this was when I—a satyr then, formed in flesh as
mirror to my soul—came as close to completing my Cantos,
my life’s work, as | have come in five sad centuries of
stubborn continuance.

(Fade to black)

It occurs to me that the Grendel tale is premature. The
players have not been brought upon the stage. Dislinear
plotting and noncontiguous prose have their adherents, not
the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is
character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum.
Haven’t you ever harbored the secret thought that

somewhere Huck and Jim are—at this instant—poling their
raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more
real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a
forgotten day ago? At any rate, if this fucking story’s to be
told, you should know who’s in it. So—as much as it pains
me—l’ll back up to begin at the beginning.

In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was
programmed in classic binary. And the Word said, “Let there
be life!” And so, somewhere in the TechnoCore vaults of my
mother’s estate, frozen sperm from my long-dead daddy was
defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the vanilla malts of
yore, loaded into something part squirt gun and part dildo,
and—at the magic touch of a trigger—ejaculated into Mother
at a time when the moon was full and the egg was ripe.

Mother didn’t have to be impregnated in this barbaric
fashion, of course. She could have chosen ex utero
fertilization, a male lover with a transplant of Daddy’s DNA,
a clonal surrogate, a gene-spliced virgin birth, you name
it ... but, as she told me later, she opened her legs to
tradition. My guess is that she preferred it that way.

Anyway, | was born.

| was born on Earth ... Old Earth... and fuck you, Lamia, if
you don’t believe it. We lived on Mother’s estate on an
island not far from the North American Preserve.

Notes for sketch of home on Old Earth:

Fragile twilights fading from violet to fuchsia to purple
above the crepe-paper silhouettes of trees beyond the
southwest sweep of lawn. Skies as delicate as translucent
china, unscarred by cloud or contrail. The presymphony
hush of first light followed by the cymbal crash of sunrise.
Oranges and russets igniting to gold, the long, cool descent
to green: leaf shadow, shade, tendrils of cypress and
weeping willow, the hushed green velvet of the glade.

Mother’s estate—our estate—a thousand acres centered in
a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so
perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft
perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth,
their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling,
now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with
the dying of the day. Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and
cypress and redwood and bonsai. Banyan trees lowering new
trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky.
Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams,
their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind.

Our house rises on a low hill where, in the winter, the
browning curves of lawn look like the smooth flank of some
female beast, all thigh muscle and meant for speed. The
house shows its centuries of accretion: a jade tower on the
east courtyard catching the first light of dawn, a series of
gables on the south wing throwing triangles of shadow on
the crystal conservatory at teatime, the balconies and maze
of exterior stairways along the east porticoes playing Escher
games with afternoon’s shadows.

It was after the Big Mistake but before everything grew
uninhabitable. Mostly we occupied the estate during what
we quaintly called “periods of remission”—stretches of ten to
eighteen quiet months between planet-wide spasms as the
Kiev Team’s goddamn little black hole digested bits of the
Earth’s center and waited for its next feast During the “Bad
Times,” we vacationed at Uncle Kowa’s place out beyond the
moon, on a terraformed asteroid brought there before the
Ouster migration.

You might already be able to tell that | was born with a
Silver spoon up my ass. | offer no apologies. After three
thousand years of dabbling with democracy, the remaining
Old Earth families had come to the realization that the only
way to avoid such riffraff was not to allow them to breed. Or,
rather, to sponsor seedship fleets; spinship explorations,
new farcaster migrations ... all of the panicked urgency of

the Hegira ... as long as they bred out there and left Old
Earth alone. The fact that the homeworld was a diseased old
bitch, gone in the teeth, didn’t hurt the riffraff’s urge to
pioneer. No fools they.

And like the Buddha, | was almost grown before | saw my
first hint of poverty. | was sixteen standard years old, on my
Wanderjahr, and backpacking through India when | saw a
beggar. The Hindu Old Families kept them around for
religious reasons, but all | knew at the time was that here
was a man in rags, ribs showing, holding out a wicker basket
with an ancient credit diskey in it, begging for a touch of my
universal card. My friends thought it was hysterical. | threw
up. It was in Benares.

My childhood was privileged but not obnoxiously so. |
have pleasant memories of Grande Dame Sybils famous
parties (she was a great-aunt on my mother’s side). |
remember one three-day affair she threw in the Manhattan
Archipelago, guests ferried in by drop-ship from Orbit City
and from the European arcologies. | remember the Empire
State Building rising from the water, its many lights
reflecting on the lagoons and fern canals; the EMVs
unloading passengers on the observation deck while
cooking fires burned on the overgrown island mounds of
lower buildings all around.

The North American Preserve was our private playground
in those days. It was said that about eight thousand people
still resided in that mysterious continent, but half of these
were rangers. The rest included the renegade ARNists who
plied their trade by resurrecting species of plants and
animals long absent from their antediluvian North American
haunts, the ecology engineers, licensed primitives such as
the Ogalalla Sioux or the Hells Angel Guild, and the
occasional tourist. | had a cousin who reportedly backpacked
from one observation zone to the other in the Preserve, but
he did so in the Midwest where the zones were relatively

close together and where the dinosaur herds were much
scarcer.

In the first century after the Big Mistake, Gaea was
mortally injured but slow in the dying. The devastation was
great during the Bad Times—and these came more often in
precisely plotted spasms, shorter remissions, more terrible
consequences after each attack—but the Earth abided and
repaired itself as best it could.

The Preserve was, as | say, our playground but, in a real
sense, so was all of the dying Earth. Mother let me have my
own EMV when | was seven and there was no place on the
globe farther than an hour’s flight from home. My best
friend, Amalfi Schwartz, lived in the Mount Erebus Estates in
what had once been the Antarctic Republic. We saw each
other daily. The fact that Old Earth law forbade farcasters did
not bother us in the least; lying on some hillside at night
looking up through the ten thousand Orbiting Lights and the
twenty thousand beacons of the Ring, at the two or three
thousand visible stars, we felt no jealousy, no urge to join
the Hegira that even then was spinning the farcaster silk of
the Worldweb. We were happy.

My memories of Mother are oddly stylized, as if she were
another fictional construct from one of my Dying Earth
novels. Perhaps she was. Perhaps | was raised by robots in
the automated cities of Europe, suckled by androids in the
Amazon Desert, or simply grown in a vat like brewers yeast.
What I recall is Mothers white gown sliding ghostlike through
the shadowed rooms of the estate; infinitely delicate blue
veins on the back of her thin-fingered hand as she poured
tea in the damask and dust light of the conservatory;
candlelight caught like a gold fly in the spiderweb sheen of
her hair, hair done up in a bun in the style of the Grandes
Dames. Sometimes | dream that | remember her voice, the
lilt and tone and turn-in-the-womb centerness of it, but then
| awake and it becomes only the wind moving lace curtains
or the sound of some alien sea on stone.

From my earliest sense of se/f, | knew that | would be—
should be—a poet. It was not as if | had a choice; more like
the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me
and commanded that | be doomed to play with words the
rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race’s thoughtless
slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; | became a poet.

| had a tutor whose name was Balthazar, human but
ancient, a refugee from ancient Alexandria’s flesh-scented
alleys. Balthazar all but glowed blue-white from those crude,
early Poulsen treatments; he was like an irradiated mummy
of a man, sealed in liquid plastic. And randy as the
proverbial goat. Centuries later, when | was in my satyr
period, | felt that | finally understood poor don Balthazar’s
priapic compulsions, but in those days it was mostly a
hindrance to keeping young girls on the estate’s staff.
Human or android, don Balthazar did not discriminate—he
poinked them all.

Luckily for my education, there was nothing homosexual
in don Balthazar’s addiction to young flesh, so his escapades
evidenced themselves either as absences from our tutorial
sessions or an inordinate amount of attention lavished on
memorizing verses from Ovid, Senesh, or Wu.

He was an excellent tutor. We studied the ancients and the
late classical period, took field trips to the ruins of Athens,
Rome, London, and Hannibal, Missouri, and never once had
a quiz or test. Don Balthazar expected me to learn
everything by heart at first encounter and | did not
disappoint him. He convinced my mother that the pitfalls of
“progressive education” were not for an Old Earth family, so
| never knew the mind-stunting shortcuts of RNA
medication, datasphere immersion, systemic flashback
training, stylized encounter groups, “higher-level thinking
Skills” at the expense of facts, or preliterate programming.
As a result of these deprivations, | was able to recite all of
Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey by the time | was six,

compose a sestina before | could dress myself, and think in
spiral fugue-verse before | ever interfaced with an Al.

My scientific education, on the other hand, was something
less than stringent. Don Balthazar had little interest in what
he referred to as “the mechanical side of the universe.” | was
twenty-two before | realized that computers, RMUs, and
Uncle Kowa’s asteroidal life-support devices were machines
and not some benevolent manifestations of the animas
around us. | believed in fairies, woodsprites, numerology,
astrology, and the magic of Midsummer's Eve deep in the
primitive forests of the NAP. Like Keats and Lamb in
Haydon’s studio, don Balthazar and | drank toasts to “the
confusion of mathematics” and mourned the destruction of
the poetry of the rainbow by M. Newton’s prying prism. The
early distrust and actual hatred of all things scientific and
clinical served me well in later life. It is not difficult, | have
learned, to remain a_pre-Copernican pagan in the
postscientific Hegemony.

My early poetry was execrable. As with most bad poets, |
was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the
very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless
abortions | was spawning. My mother remained tolerant
even as | left reeking little piles of doggerel lying around the
house. She was indulgent of her only child even if he was as
blithely incontinent as an unhousebroken Ilama. Don
Balthazar never commented on my work; primarily, |
assume, because | never showed him any of it. Don
Balthazar thought that the venerable Daton was a fraud,
that Salmud Brevy and Robert Frost should have hanged
themselves with their own entrails, that Wordsworth was a
fool, and that anything less than Shakespeare’s sonnets was
a profanation of the language. | saw no reason to bother don
Balthazar with my verse, rife with budding genius though |
knew it to be.

| published several of these little literary turds in the
various hardcopy journals then in vogue in the various
arcologies of the European Houses, the amateur editors of
these crude journals being as indulgent of my mother as she
was of me. Occasionally | would press Amalfi or one of my
other playmates—less aristocratic than | and thus with
access to the datasphere or fatline transmitters—to uplink
some of my verses to the Ring or to Mars, and thus to the
burgeoning farcaster colonies. They never replied. | assumed
they were too busy.

Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid
test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful
belief in one’s immortality ... and the inevitable
disillusionment is just as painful.

My mother died with Old Earth. About half the Old Families
stayed during that last cataclysm; | was twenty years old
then and had made my own romantic plans to die with the
homeworld. Mother decided otherwise. What concerned her
was not my premature demise—like me, she was far too self-
centered to think of someone else at a time like that—nor
even the fact that the death of my DNA would mark the end
of a line of aristocrats which stretched back to the
Mayflower, no, what bothered Mother was that the family
was going to die out in debt. Our last hundred years of
extravagance, it seems, had been financed through massive
loans from the Ring Bank and other discreet extraterrestrial
institutions. Now that the continents of Earth were crashing
under the impact of contraction, the great forests aflame,
the oceans heaving and heating themselves into a lifeless
soup, the very air transforming itself into something too hot
and thick to break and too thin to plow, now the banks
wanted their money back. | was collateral.

Or, rather, Mother’s plan was. She liquidated all available
assets some weeks before that phrase became a literal

reality, deposited a quarter of a million marks in long-term
accounts in the fleeing Ring Bank, and dispatched me on a
trip to the Rifkin Atmospheric Protectorate on Heaven’s
Gate, a minor world circling the star Vega. Even then, that
poisonous world had a farcaster connection to Sol System,
but | did not farcast. Nor was | a passenger on the single
spinship with Hawking drive which put into Heavens Gate
each standard year. No, Mother sent me to this hack end of
the outback on a Phase Three ramship, slower than light,
frozen with the cattle embryos and orange juice concentrate
and feeder viruses, on a trip that took one hundred and
twenty-nine shipboard years, with an objective time-debt of
one hundred and sixty-seven standard years!

Mother figured that the accrued interest on the long-term
accounts would be enough to pay off our family debt and
perhaps allow me to survive comfortably for a while. For the
first and last time in her life, Mother figured wrong.

Notes for a sketch of Heaven’s Gate:

Mud lanes which run back from the station’s conversion
docks like a pattern of sores on a leper’s back. Sufrus-brown
clouds which hang in tatters from a rotten burlap sky. A
tangle of shapeless wooden structures half decayed before
they were ever fully constructed, their paneless windows
now staring sightlessly into the gaping mouths of their
neighbors. Indigenies breeding like ... like humans, |
suppose ... eyeless cripples, lungs burned out with air rot,
squiring a nest of a dozen offspring, the children’s skin
scabrous by age _ five-standard, their eyes watering
incessantly from the sting of an atmosphere which will kill
them before they’re forty, their smiles carious, their oily hair
rife with lice and the blood bags of dracula ticks. Proud
parents beaming. Twenty million of these doomed schmucks,
crowded into slums overflowing an island smaller than my
family’s west lawn on Old Earth, all of them fighting to

breathe the only breathable air on a world where the
standard is to inhale and die, crowding ever closer to the
center of the sixty-mile radius of survivable atmosphere
which the Atmospheric Generating Station had been able to
provide before it began to malfunction.

Heaven's Gate: my new home.

Mother had not taken into account the possibility that all
Old Earth accounts would be frozen—and then appropriated
into the growing Worldweb economy. Nor had she
remembered that the reason people had waited for the
Hawking drive to see the spiral arm of the galaxy is that in
long-term cryogenie sleep—as opposed to a few weeks or
months of fugue—chances of terminal brain damage were
one in six. | was lucky. When | was uncrated on Heaven’s
Gate and put to work digging out acid canals beyond the
perimeter, | had suffered only a cerebral accident—a stroke.
Physically, | was able to work in the mud pits within a few
local weeks. Mentally, there was much left to be desired.

The left side of my brain had been shut down like a
damaged section of a spinship being sealed off, airtight
doors leaving the doomed compartments open to vacuum. |
could still think. Control of the right side of my body soon
returned. Only the language centers had been damaged
beyond simple repair. The marvelous organic computer
wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a
flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some
language—but only the most emotionally charged units of
communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my
vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, | learned
later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two
or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of
manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn,
motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo.

A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. | had at
my disposal eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of
the eight nouns could double as verbs. | retained one

indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could
be used as a verb or expletive. My new language universe
was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound
words, and two baby-talk repetitions. My arena of literal
expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination,
two references to human anatomy, one request for divine
imprecation, one standard description of or request for
coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option
for me since my mother was deceased.

All in all, it was enough.

| will not say that | remember my three years in the mud
pits and slime slums of Heaven’s Gate with fondness, but it
is true that these years were at least as formative as—and
probably more so than—my previous two decades on Old
Earth.

| soon found that among my intimate acquaintances—Old
Sludge, the scoop-shovel foreman; Unk, the slumyard bully
to whom | paid my protection bribes; Kiti, the lice-ridden crib
doxy whom | slept with when | could afford it—my
vocabulary served me well. “Shit-fuck,” | would grunt,
gesticulating. “Asshole cunt peepee fuck.”

“Ah,” grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, “going to
the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?”

“Goddamn poopoo,” | would grin back at him.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-
dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations
of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to
what is perceived and remembered. My three local years on
Heaven’s Gate, almost fifteen hundred standard days,
allowed me to see, to feel, to hear—to remember, as if |
literally had been born again. Little matter that | had been
born again in hell; reworked experience is the stuff of all
true poetry and raw experience was the birthing gift of my
new life.

There was no problem adapting to a brave new world a
century and a half beyond my own. For all of our talk of
expansion and pioneering spirit these past five centuries, we
all know how stultified and static our human universe has
become. We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive
mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual
evolution rather than revolution; scientific research creeps
crablike in a lateral shuffle, where once it leaped in great
intuitive bounds; devices change even less, plateau
technologies common to us would be instantly identifiable—
and operable!—to our great-grandfathers. So while | slept
the Hegemony became a formal entity, the Worldweb was
spun to something close to its final shape, the All Thing took
its democratic place among the list of humanity’s
benevolent despots, the TechnoCore seceded from human
service and then offered its help as an ally rather than a
slave, and the Ousters retreated to darkness and the role of
Nemesis ... but all these things had been creeping toward
critical mass even before | was frozen into my ice coffin
between the pork bellies and sherbet, and such obvious
extensions of old trends took little effort to understand.
Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark,
digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable
cow viewed from afar by historians.

My life was Heaven’s Gate and the minute-to-minute
demands of survival there. The sky was always an eternal
yellow-brown sunset hanging like a collapsing ceiling mere
meters above my shack. My shack was oddly comfortable: a
table for eating, a cot for sleeping and fucking, a hole for
pissing and shitting, and a window for silent staring. My
environment mirrored my vocabulary.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as
it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and
Heaven’s Gate was no exception. The Atmospheric
Protectorate owned my body but my mind—or what was left
of it—was mine.

On Old Earth, my poetry was composed on a Sadu-
Dekenar comlog thought processor while | lounged in a
padded chaise longue or floated in my EM barge above dark
lagoons or walked pensively through scented bowers. The
execrable, undisciplined, limp-wristed flatulent products of
those reveries already have been described. On Heaven's
Gate, | discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor
could be; not mere physical labor, | should add, but
absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping,
ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as
long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, | discovered,
the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative
climes, it actually flees to higher planes.

Thus, on Heaven’s Gate, as | dredged bottom scum from
the slop canals under the red gaze of Vega Primo or crawled
on hands and knees through stalactites and stalagmites of
rebreather bacteria in the station’s labrynthine lungpipes, |
became a poet.

All | lacked were the words.

The twentieth century’s most honored writer, William Gass,
once said in an interview: “Words are the supreme objects.
They are minded things.”

And so they are. As pure and transcendent as any Idea
which ever cast a shadow into Plato’s dark cave of pur
perceptions. But they are also pitfalls of deceit and
misperception. Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of
self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental
lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the
objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality
which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for
“honesty” is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing
next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late
English word “integrity” mean? Or “Motherland”? Or

“progress”? Or “democracy”? Or “beauty”? But even in our
self-deception, we become gods.

A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell who
lived and died in the same century as Gass once wrote:
“Language serves not only to express thought but to make
possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” Here is
the essence of mankind’s creative genius: not the edifices of
civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but
the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatazoa
attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-
twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the
human species can, will, or should make to the raveling
cosmos. (Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander’s.
Yes, we construct artifacts but so have species ranging from
beavers to the architect ants whose crenellated towers are
visible right now off the port bow. Yes, we weave real-fabric
things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe
is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and n peeps
out. Enter a new solar system and Tycho Brahe’s formulae lie
waiting under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But
where has the universe hidden a word under its outer layer
of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?) Even the traces of
other intelligent life we have found—the blimps on Jove Il,
the Labyrinth Builders, the Seneschai empaths on Hebron,
the Stick People of Durulis, the architects of the Time Tombs,
the Shrike itself—have left us mysteries and obscure
artifacts but no language. No words.

The poet John Keats once wrote to a friend of his named
Bailey: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the
Heart’s affection and the truth of Imagination—What the
imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it
existed before or not.”

The Chinese poet George Wu, who died in the Last Sino-
Japanese War about three centuries before the Hegira,
understood this when he recorded on his comlog: “Poets are
the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what

can be, but what must become.” Later, on his last disk to his
lover the week before he died, Wu said: “Words are the only
bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

You see, in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was
made flesh in the weave of the human universe. And only
the poet can expand this universe, finding shortcuts to new
realities the way the Hawking drive tunnels under the
barriers of Einsteinian space/time.

To be a poet, | realized, a true poet, was to become the
Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet
is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth
pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.

To be a true poet is to become God.

| tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate.
“Piss, shit,” | said. “Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit
goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!”

They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away.
Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.

The yellow-brown clouds rained acid on me. | waded in
mud up to my thighs and cleaned leechweed from the city
sewer pipes. Old Sludge died during my second year there
when we were all working on a project extending the First
Avenue Canal to the Midsump Mudflats. An accident. He was
climbing a slime dune to rescue a single sulfur-rose from the
advancing grouter when there was a mudquake. Kiti married
Shortly after that. She still worked part time as a crib doxy,
but | saw less and less of her. She died in childbirth shortly
after the green tsunami carried away Mudflat City. |
continued to write poetry.

How is it, you might ask, that someone can write fine verse
with a vocabulary of only nine right-hemisphere words?

The answer is that | used no words at all. Poetry is only
secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. | dealt
with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow,

weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the
way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the
whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the
glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.

And slowly the words returned. The brain retrains and
retools itself amazingly well. What had been lost in the left
hemisphere found a home elsewhere or reasserted their
primacy in the damaged regions like pioneers returning to a
fire-damaged plain made more fertile by the flames. Where
before a simple word like “salt” would leave me stuttering
and gasping, my mind probing emptiness like a tongue
prodding the socket of a missing tooth, now the words and
phrases flowed back slowly, like the names of forgotten
playmates. During the day | labored in the slimefields, but at
night | sat at my splintered table and wrote my Cantos by
the light of a hissing ghee lamp. Mark Twain once opined in
his homey way: “The difference between the right word and
the almost right word is the difference between lightning
and the lightning bug.” He was droll but incomplete. During
those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven’s
Gate, | discovered that the difference between finding the
right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word
was the difference between being struck by lightning and
merely watching a lightning display.

So my Cantos began and grew. Written on the flimsy
sheets of recycled leechweed fiber which they issued by the
ton for use as toilet paper, scribbled by one of the cheap
felt-tip pens sold at the Company Store, the Cantos took
Shape. As the words returned, slipping into place like once
scattered pieces of a 3-D puzzle, | needed a form. Returning
to don Balthazar’s teachings, | tried on the measured
nobility of Milton’s epic verse. Gaining confidence, | added
the romantic sensuality of a Byron matured by a Keatsish
celebration of the language. Stirring all this, | seasoned the
mixture with a dash of Yeats’s brilliant cynicism and a pinch
of Pound’s obscure, scholastic arrogance. | chopped, diced,

and added such ingredients as Eliot’s control of imagery,
Dylan Thomas’s feel for place, Delmore Schwartz’s sense of
doom, Steve Tem’s touch of horror, Salmud Brevy’s plea for
innocence, Daton’s love of the convoluted rhyme scheme,
Wu’s worship of the physical, and Edmond Ki Fererra’s
radical playfulness.

In the end, of course, | threw this entire mixture out and
wrote the Cantos in a style all my own.

If it had not been for Unk the slumyard bully, | probably
still would be on Heaven’s Gate, digging acid canals by day
and writing Cantos by night.

It was my day off and | was carrying my Cantos—the only
copy of my manuscript!—to the Company Library in the
Common Hall to do some research when Unk and two of his
cronies appeared from an alley and demanded immediate
payment of the next month’s protection money. We had no
universal cards in the Heaven’s Gate Atmospheric
Protectorate; we paid our debts in company scrip or bootleg
marks. | had neither. Unk demanded to see what was in my
plastic shoulder bag. Without thinking, | refused. It was a
mistake. If I'd shown Unk the manuscript, he most probably
would have scattered it in the mud and slapped me around
after making threats. As it was, my refusal angered him so
he and his two Neanderthal companions tore open the bag,
scattered the manuscript in the mud, and beat me within
the proverbial inch of my life.

It so happened that on this day an EMV belonging to a
Protectorate air quality control manager was passing low
above and the wife of the manager, traveling alone to the
arc’s Company Residential Store, ordered the EMV down,
had her android servant retrieve me and what was left of my
Cantos, and then personally drove me to the Company
Hospital. Normally, the members of the bonded work force
received medical aid, if any, at the walk-in Bio Clinic, but the

hospital did not want to refuse the wife of a manager so |
was admitted—still unconscious—and watched over by a
human doctor and the manager’s wife while | recovered in a
healing tank.

All right, to make a banal long story into a banal short
story, l'Il cut to the uplink. Helenda—that was the manager’s
wife—read my manuscript while | was floating in renewal
nutrient. She liked it. On the same day | was being decanted
in the Company Hospital, Helenda farcast to Renaissance
where she showed my Cantos to her sister Felia, who had a
friend whose lover knew an editor at Transline Publishing.
When | awoke the next day, my broken ribs had been set,
my shattered cheekbone had been healed, my bruises were
gone, and I'd received five new teeth, a new cornea for my
left eye, and a contract with Transline.

My book came out five weeks later. A week after that,
Helenda divorced her manager and married me. It was her
seventh marriage, my first. We honeymooned on the
Concourse and, when we returned a month later, my book
had sold more than a billion copies—the first book of verse
to hit the bestseller lists in four centuries—and | was a
millionaire many times over.

Tyrena Wingreen-Feif was my first editor at Transline. It
was her idea to title the book The Dying Earth (a records
search showed a novel by that name five hundred years
earlier, but the copyright had lapsed and the book was out
of print). It was her idea to publish just the sections of the
Cantos which dealt with the nostalgic final days of Old
Earth. And it was her idea to remove the sections which she
thought would bore the _ readers—the philosophical
passages, the descriptions of my mother, the sections which
paid homage to earlier poets, the places where | played with
experimental verse, the more personal passages—
everything, in fact, except the descriptions of the idyllic final

days which, emptied of all heavier freight, came across as
sentimental and insipid. Four months after publication The
Dying Earth had sold two and a half billion hardfax copies,
an abridged and digitalized version was available on the See
Thing datasphere, and it had been optioned for the holies.
Tyrena pointed out that the timing had been perfect ... that
the original trauma shock of the death of Old Earth had
meant a century of denial, almost as if Earth had never
existed, followed by a period of revived interest culminating
in the Old Earth nostalgia cults which could now be found on
every world in the Web. A book—even a book of verse—
dealing with the final days had struck at precisely the right
moment.

For me, the first few months of life as a celebrity in the
Hegemony were far more disorienting than my earlier
transition from spoiled son of Old Earth to enslaved stroke
victim on Heaven’s Gate. During those first months | did
book and fax signing on more than a hundred worlds; |
appeared on “The AllNet Now!” show with Marmon Hamlit; |
met CEO Senister Perót and All Thing Speaker Drury Fein as
well as a score of senators; | spoke to the Interplanetary
Society of PEN Women and to the Lusus Writers’ Union; | was
given honorary degrees at the University of New Earth and
at Cambridge Two; | was feted, interviewed, imaged,
reviewed (favorably), bioed (unauthorized), lionized,
serialized, and swindled. It was a busy time.

Notes for a sketch of life in the Hegemony:

My home has thirty-eight rooms on thirty-six worlds. No
doors: the arched entrances are farcaster portals, a few
opaqued with privacy curtains, most open to observation
and entry. Each room has windows everywhere and at least
two walls with portals. From the grand dining hall on
Renaissance Vector, | can see the bronze skies and the

verdigris towers of Keep Enable in the valley below my
volcanic peak, and by turning my head | can look through
the farcaster portal and across the expanse of white carpet
in the formal living area to see the Edgar Allan Sea crash
against the spires of Point Prospero on Nevermore. My library
looks out on the glaciers and green skies of Nordholm while
a walk of ten paces allows me to descend a short stairway to
my tower study, a comfortable, open room encircled by
polarized glass which offers a three-hundred-sixty-degree
view of the highest peaks of the Kushpat Karakoram, a
mountain range two thousand kilometers from the nearest
settlement in the easternmost reaches of the Jamnu
Republic on Deneb Drei.

The huge sleeping room Helenda and | share rocks gently
in the boughs of a three-hundred-meter Worldtree on the
Templar world of God’s Grove and connects to a solarium
which sits alone on the arid saltflats of Hebron. Not all of our
views are of wilderness: the media room opens to a skimmer
pad on the hundred and thirty-eighth floor of a Tau Ceti
Center arctower and our patio lies on a terrace overlooking
the market in the Old Section of bustling New Jerusalem. The
architect, a student of the legendary Millon DeHaVre, has
incorporated several small jokes into the house’s design: the
steps go down to the tower room, of course, but equally droll
is the exit from the eyrie which leads to the exercise room on
the lowest level of Lusus’s deepest Hive, or perhaps the
guest bathroom which consists of toilet, bidet, sink and
shower stall on an open, wall-less raft afloat on the violet
seaworld of Mare Infinitus.

At first the shifts in gravity from room to room were
disturbing, but | soon adapted, subconsciously bracing
myself for the drag of Lusus and Hebron and Sol Draconi
Septem, unconsciously anticipating the less than 1-
standard-g freedom of the majority of the rooms.

In the ten standard months Helenda and | are together we
spend little time in our home, preferring instead to move

with friends among the resorts and vacation arcologies and
night spots of the Worldweb. Our “friends” are the former
farcaster set, now calling themselves the Caribou Herd after
an extinct, Old Earth migratory mammal. This herd consists
of other writers, a few successful visual artists, Concourse
intellectuals, All Thing media representatives, a few radical
ARNists and cosmetic gene splicers, Web aristocrats,
wealthy farcaster freaks and Flashback addicts, a few holie
and stage directors, a scattering of actors and performance
artists, several Mafia dons gone straight, and a revolving list
of recent celebrities ... myself included.

Everyone drinks, uses stims and autoimplants, takes the
wire, and can afford the best drugs. The drug of choice is
Flashback. It is definitely an upper-class vice: one needs the
full range of expensive implants to fully experience it.
Helenda has seen to it that | have been so fitted:
biomonitors, sensory extenders, and internal comlog, neural
shunts, kickers, metacortex processors, blood chips, RNA
tapeworms ... my mother wouldn’t have recognized my
insides.

| try Flashback twice. The first time is a glide—I target my
ninth birthday party and hit it with the first salvo. It is all
there: the servants singing on the north lawn at daybreak,
don Balthazar grudgingly canceling classes so | can spend
the day with Amalfi in my EMV, streaking across the gray
dunes of the Amazon Basin in gay abandon; the torchlight
procession that evening as representatives of the other Old
Families arrive at dusk, their brightly wrapped presents
gleaming under the moon and the Ten Thousand Lights. |
rise from nine hours in Flashback with a smile on my face.
The second trip almost kills me.

| am four and crying, seeking my mother through endless
rooms smelling of dust and old furniture. Android servants
seek to console me but | shake off their hands, running down
hallways soiled with shadows and the soot of too many
generations. Breaking the first rule | ever learned, | throw

open the doors to Mother’s sewing room, her sanctum
Sanctorum to which she retires for three hours every
afternoon and from which she emerges with her soft smile,
the hem of her pale dress whispering across the carpet like
the echo of a ghost’s sigh.

Mother is sitting there in the shadows. | am four and my
finger has been hurt and | rush to her, throwing myself into
her arms.

She does not respond. One of her elegant arms remains
reclined along the back of the chaise longue, the other
remains limp on the cushion.

| pull back, shocked by her cool plasticity. | tug open the
heavy velvet drapes without rising from her lap.

Mother’s eyes are white, rolled back in her head. Her lips
are slightly open. Drool moistens the comers of her mouth
and glints on her perfect chin. From the gold threads of her
hair—done up in the Grande Dame style she favors—l see
the cold steel gleam of the stim wire and the duller sheen of
the skull socket she has plugged it into. The patch of bone
on either side is very white. On the table near her left hand
lies the empty Flashback syringe.

The servants arrive and pull me away. Mother never blinks.
| am pulled screaming from the room.

| wake screaming.

Perhaps it was my refusal to use Flashback again; which
hastened Helenda’s departure, but | doubt it. | was a toy to
her—a primitive who amused her by my innocence about a
life she had taken for granted for many decades. Whatever
the case, my refusal to Flashback left me with many days
without her; the time spent in replay is real time and
Flashback users often die having spent more days of their
lives under the drug than they ever experienced conscious.

At first | entertained myself with the implants and
technotoys which had been denied to me as a member of an

Old Earth Family. The datasphere was a construct delight
that first year—I called up information almost constantly,
living in a frenzy of full interface. | was as addicted to raw
data as the Caribou Herd were to their stims and drugs. |
could imagine don Balthazar spinning in his molten grave as
| gave up long-term memory for the transient satisfaction of
implant omniscience. It was only later that | felt the loss—
Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, Wu’s Final March, and a score of other
epics which had survived my stroke now were shredded like
cloud fragments in a high wind. Much later, freed of
implants, | painstakingly learned them all again.

For the first and only time in my life | became political.
Days and nights would pass with me monitoring the Senate
on farcaster cable or lying tapped into the All Thing.
Someone once estimated that the All Thing deals with about
a hundred active pieces of Hegemony legislation per day,
and during my months spent screwed into the sensorium |
missed none of them. My voice and name became well
known on the debate channels. No bill was too small, no
issue too simple or too complex for my input. The simple act
of voting every few minutes gave me a false sense of having
accomplished something. | finally gave up the political
obsession only after | realized that accessing the All Thing
regularly meant either staying home or turning into a
walking zombie. A person constantly busy accessing on his
implants makes a pitiful sight in public and it didn’t take
Helenda’s derision to make me realize that if | stayed home |
would turn into an All Thing sponge like so many millions of
other slugs around the Web. So | gave up politics. But by
then | had found a new passion: religion.

| joined religions. Hell, | helped create religions. The Zen
Gnostic Church was expanding exponentially and | became
a true believer, appearing on HTV talk shows and searching
for my Placed of Power with all of the devoutness of a pre-
Hegira Muslim pilgrimaging to Mecca. Besides, | loved
farcasting. | had earned almost a hundred million marks

from royalties for The Dying Earth, and Helenda had
invested well, but someone once figured that a farcaster
home such as mine cost more than fifty thousand marks a
day just to keep in the Web and | did not limit my farcasting
to the thirty-six worlds of my home. Transline Publishing had
qualified me for a gold universal card and | used it liberally,
farcasting to unlikely corners of the Web and then spending
weeks staying in luxury accommodations and leasing EMVs
to find my Places of Power in remote areas of backwater
worlds.

| found none. | renounced Zen Gnosticism about the same
time Helenda divorced me. By that time the bills were piling
up and | had to liquidate most of the stock and long-term
investments remaining to me after Helenda had taken her
Share. (I was not only naive and in love when she had had
her attorneys draw up the marriage contract ... | was stupid.)

Eventually, even with such economies as cutting down my
farcasting and dismissing the android servants, | was facing
financial disaster.

| went to see Tyrena Wingreen-Feif.

“No one wants to read poetry,” she said, leafing through
the thin stack of Cantos | had written in the past year and a
half.

“What do you mean?” | said. “The Dying Earth was
poetry.”

“The Dying Earth was a fluke,” said Tyrena. Her nails were
long and green and curved in the latest mandarin fashion;
they curled around my manuscript like the claws of some
chlorophyll beast. “It sold because the mass subconscious
was ready for it.”

“Maybe the mass subconscious is ready for this,” | said. |
was beginning to get angry.

Tyrena laughed. It was not an altogether pleasant sound.
“Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said. “This is poetry. You’re

writing about Heaven’s Gate and the Caribou Herd, but what
comes across is loneliness, displacement, angst, and a
cynical look at Humanity.”

“So?”

“So no one wants to pay for a look at another person’s
angst,” laughed Tyrena.

| turned away from her desk and walked to the far side of
the room. Her office took up the entire four hundred and
thirty-fifth floor of the Transline Spire in the Babel section of
Tau Ceti Center. There were no windows; the circular room
was open from floor to ceiling, shielded by a solar-generated
containment field which showed no shimmer whatsoever. It
was like standing between two gray plates suspended
halfway between the sky and earth. | watched crimson
clouds move between the lesser spires half a kilometer
below and | thought about hubris. Tyrena’s office had no
doorways, stairways, elevators, field lifts, or trapdoors: no
connection to the other levels at all. One entered Tyrena’s
office through the five-faceted farcaster which shimmered in
midair like an abstract holosculpture. | found myself
thinking about tower fires and power failures as well as
hubris. | said, “Are you saying that you won’t publish it?”

“Not at all,” smiled my editor. “You’ve earned Transline
several billion marks, Martin. We will publish it. All | am
saying is that no one will buy it.”

“You're wrong!” | shouted. “Not everyone recognizes fine
poetry, but there are still enough people who read to make it
a bestseller.”

Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward
in a twist of green lips. “Martin, Martin, Martin,” she said,
“the population of literate people has been declining
steadily since Gutenberg’s day. By the twentieth century,
less than two percent of the people in the so-called
industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And
that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-
friendly environments. By the Hegira, ninety-eight percent

of the Hegemony’s population had no reason to read
anything. So they didn’t bother learning how to. It’s worse
today. There are more than a hundred billion human beings
in the Worldweb and less than one percent of them bothers
to hardfax any printed material, much less read a book.”

“The Dying Earth sold almost three billion copies,” |
reminded her.

“Mm-hmm,” said Tyrena. “It was the Pilgrim’s Progress
Effect.”

“The what?”

“Pilgrim’s Progress Effect. In the Massachusetts Colony
of ... what was it!—seventeenth-century Old Earth, every
decent family had to have a copy in the household. But, my
heavens, no one had to read it. It was the same with Hitler’s
Mein Kampf or Stukatsky’s Visions in the Eye of a
Decapitated Child”.

“Who was Hitler?” | said.

Tyrena smiled slightly. “An Old Earth politician who did
some writing. Mein Kampf is still in print ... Transline renews
the copyright every hundred and thirty-eight years.”

“Well, look,” | said, “I’m going to take a few weeks to
polish up the Cantos and give it my best shot.”

“Fine,” smiled Tyrena.

“I suppose you'll want to edit it the way you did last
time?”

“Not at all,” said Tyrena. “Since there’s no core of nostalgia
this time, you might as well write it the way you want.”

| blinked. “You mean | can keep in the blank verse this
time?”

“Of course.”

“And the philosophy?”

“Please do.”

“And the experimental sections?”

“Yes.”

“And you'll print it the way | write it?”

“Absolutely.”

“Is there a chance it'll sell?”
“Not a hope in hell.”

My “few weeks to polish up the Cantos” turned into ten
months of obsessive labor. | shut off most of the rooms in the
house, keeping only the tower room on Deneb Drei, the
exercise room on Lusus, the kitchen, and the bathroom raft
on Mare Infinitus. | worked a straight ten hours a day, took a
break for some vigorous exercise followed by a meal and a
nap, and then returned to my writing table for another eight-
hour stint. It was similar to the time five years before when |
was recovering from my stroke and it sometimes took an
hour or a day for a word to come to me, for a concept to sink
its roots into the firm soil of language. Now it was an even
slower process as | agonized over the perfect word, the
precise rhyme scheme, the most playful image, and the
most ineffable analog to the most elusive emotion.

After ten standard months | was done, acknowledging the
ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever
finished, merely ahandoned.

“What do you think?” | asked Tyrena as she read through
the first copy.

Her eyes were blank, bronze disk in that week’s fashion,
but this did not hide the fact that there were tears there. She
brushed one away. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

“I tried to rediscover the voice of some of the Ancients,” |
said, suddenly shy.

“You succeeded brilliantly.”

“The Heaven’s Gate Interlude is still rough,” | said.

“It’s perfect.”

“It’s about loneliness,” | said.

“It is loneliness.”

“Do you think it’s ready?” | asked.

“It’s perfect ... a masterpiece.”

“Do you think it’ll sell?” Tasked.

“No fucking way.”

They planned an initial run of seventy million hardfax
copies of Cantos. Transline ran ads throughout the
datasphere, placed HTV commercials, transmitted software
inserts, successfully solicited blurbs from best-selling
authors, made sure it was reviewed in the New New York
Times Book Section and the TC? Review, and generally spent
a fortune on advertising.

The Cantos sold twenty-three thousand hardfax copies
during the first year it was in print. At ten percent royalties
of the 12MK cover price, | had earned back 13,800MK of my
2,000,000MK advance from Transline. The second year saw a
sale of 638 hardfax copies; there were no datasphere rights
sold, no holie options, and no book tours.

What the Cantos lacked in sales it made up for in negative
reviews: “Indecipherable ... archaic ... irrelevant to all
Current concerns,” said the Times Book Section. “M. Silenus
has committed the ultimate act of noncommunication,”
wrote Urban Kapry in the TC? Review, “by indulging himself
in an orgy of pretentious obfuscation.” Marmon Hamlit on
“AllNet Now!” issued the final deathblow: “Oh, the poetry
thing from Whathisname—couldn’t read it. Didn’t try.”

Tyrena Wingreen-Feif did not seem concerned. Two weeks
after the first reviews and hardfax returns came in, a day
after my thirteen-day binge ended, | farcast to her office and
threw myself into the black flowfoam chair which crouched
in the center of the room like a velvet panther. One of Tau
Ceti Center’s legendary thunderstorms was going on and
Jovian-sized lightning crashes were rending the blood-tinged
air just beyond the invisible containment field.

“Don't sweat it,” said Tyrena. This week’s fashions
included a hairdo which sent black spikes thrusting half a

meter above her forehead and a body field opaciter which
left shifting currents of color concealing—and revealing—the
nudity beneath. “The first run only amounted to sixty
thousand fax transmits so we’re not out much there.”

“You said seventy million were planned,” | said.

“Yeah, well, we changed our minds after Transline’s
resident Al read it.”

| slumped lower in the flowfoam. “Even the Al hated it?”

“The Al loved it,” said Tyrena. “That’s when we knew for
sure that peop/e were going to hate it.”

| sat up. “Couldn’t we have sold copies to the
TechnoCore?”

“We did,” said Tyrena. “One. The millions of Als there
probably real-time-shared it the minute it came in over
fatline. Interstellar copyright doesn’t mean shit when you're
dealing with silicon.”

“All right,” | said, slumping. “What next?” Outside,
lightning bolts the size of Old Earth’s ancient superhighways
danced between the corporate spires and cloud towers.

Tyrena rose from her desk and walked to the edge of the
carpeted circle. Her body field flickered like electrically
charged oil on water. “Next,” she said, “you decide if you
want to be a writer or the Worldweb’s biggest jerk-off.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Tyrena turned and smiled. Her teeth had
been capped to gold points. “The contract allows us to
recover the advance in any way we have to. Seizing your
assets at Interbank, recovering the gold coins you've got
hidden on Homefree, and selling that gaudy farcaster house
would about do it. And then you can go join the other
artistic dilettantes and dropouts and mental cases that Sad
King Billy collects on whatever Outback world he lives on.”

| stared.

“Then again,” she said and smiled her cannibal smile, “we
can just forget this temporary setback and you can get to
work on your next book.”

My next book appeared five standard months later. The
Dying Earth II picked up where The Dying Earth left off, in
plain prose this time, the sentence length and chapter
content carefully guided by neuro-bio-monitored responses
on a test group of 638 average hardfax readers. The book
was in novel form, short enough not to intimidate the
potential buyer at Food Mart checkout stands, and the cover
was a twenty-second interactive holo wherein the tall,
swarthy stranger—Amalfi Schwartz, | suppose, although
Amalfi was short and pale and wore corrective lenses—rips
the bodice of the struggling female just to the nipple line
before the protesting blonde turns toward the viewer and
cries for help in a breathless whisper provided by porn holie
star Leeda Swann.

Dying Earth I! sold nineteen million copies.

“Not bad,” said Tyrena. “It takes awhile to build an
audience.”

“The first Dying Earth sold three billion copies,” | said.

“Pilgrim’s Progress,” she said. “Mein Kampf. Once in a
century. Maybe less.”

“But it sold three billion...”

“Look,” said Tyrena. “In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast
food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added
carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold
nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

Dying Earth lll introduced the characters of Winona, the
escaped slave girl who rose to the ownership of her own
fiberplastic plantation (never mind that fiberplastic never
grew on Old Earth), Arturo Redgrave, the dashing blockade
runner (what blockade?!), and Innocence Sperry, the nine-
year-old telepath dying of an unspecified Little Nell disease.
Innocence lasted until Dying Earth IX, and on the day
Transline allowed me to kill the little shit off, | went out to
celebrate with a six-day, twenty-world binge. | awoke in a

lungpipe on Heaven’s Gate, covered with vomit and
rebreather mold, nursing the Web’s biggest headache and
the sure knowledge that | soon would have to start on
Volume X of The Chronicles of the Dying Earth.

It isn’t hard being a hack writer. Between Dying Earth II
and Dying Earth IX, six standard years had passed relatively
painlessly. My research was meager, my plots formulaic, my
characters cardboard, my prose preliterate, and my free time
was my own. I traveled. | married twice more; each wife left
me with no hard feelings but with a sizable portion of the
royalties from my next Dying Earth. | explored religions and
serious drinking, finding more hope of lasting solace in the
latter.

| kept my home, adding six rooms on five worlds, and filled
it with fine art. | entertained. Writers were among my
acquaintances but, as in all times, we tended to mistrust
and badmouth each other, secretly resenting the others’
successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew in
his or her heart that he or she was a true artist of the word
who merely happened to be commercial; the others were
hacks.

Then, on a cool morning with my sleeping room rocking
Slightly in the upper branches of my tree on the Templar
world, | awoke to a gray sky and the realization that my
muse had fled.

It had been five years since | had written any poetry. The
Cantos lay open in the Deneb Drei tower, only a few pages
finished beyond what had been published. | had been using
thought processors to write my novels and one of these
activated as | entered the study. suit, it printed out, wna pip! po
WITH MY MUSE ?

It sayS something about the type of writing | had been
doing that my muse could flee without my noticing. For

those who do not write and who never have been stirred by
the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a
quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our
muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language
which they help to sculpt. When one is writing—really
writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true
poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels
when the mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the
pen or thought processor, ordering and expressing the
revelations flowing in from somewhere else.

My muse had fled. | sought her in the other worlds of my
house but only silence echoed back from the art-bedecked
walls and empty spaces. | farcast and flew to my favorite
places, watching the suns set on the windblown prairies of
Grass and the night fogs obscure the ebony crags of
Nevermore, but although | emptied my mind of the trash-
prose of the endless Dying Earth, there came no whispers
from my muse.

| sought her in alcohol and Flashback, returning to the
productive days on Heaven’s Gate when her inspiration was
a constant buzzing in my ears, interrupting my work, waking
me from sleep, but in the relived hours and days her voice
was as muted and garbled as a damaged audio disk from
some forgotten century.

My muse had fled.

| farcast to Tyrena Wingreen-Feif’s office at the precise
moment of my appointment. Tyrena had been promoted
from editor-in-chief of the hardfax division to publisher. Her
new office occupied the highest level of the Tau Ceti Center
Transline Spire and standing there was like perching on the
carpeted summit of the galaxy’s tallest, thinnest peak; only
the invisible dome of the slightly polarized containment
field arched overhead and the edge of the carpet ended ina

six-kilometer drop. | wondered if other authors felt the urge
to jump.

“The new opus?” said Tyrena. Lusus was dominating the
fashion universe this week and “dominate” was the right
word; my editor was dressed in leather and iron, rusted
spikes on her wrists and neck and a massive bandolier
across her shoulder and left breast. The cartridges looked
real.

“Yeah,” | said and tossed the manuscript box on her desk.

“Martin, Martin, Martin,” she sighed, “when are you going
to transmit your books rather than going to all of the trouble
of printing them out and bringing them here in person?”

“There’s a strange satisfaction in delivering them,” | said.
“Especially this one.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” | said. “Why don’t you read some of it?”

Tyrena smiled and clicked black fingernails along the
cartridges in her bandolier. “I’m sure it’s up to your usual
high standards, Martin,” she said. “I don’t have to look at it.”

“Please do,” | said.

“Really,” said Tyrena, “there’s no reason. It always makes
me nervous to read a new work while the author is present.”

“This one won't,” | said. “Read just the first few pages.”

She must have heard something in my voice because she
frowned slightly and opened the box. The frown deepened
as she read the first page and flipped through the rest of the
manuscript.

Page one had a single sentence: “And then, one fine
morning in October, the Dying Earth swallowed its own
bowels, spasmed its final spasm and died.” The other two
hundred and ninety-nine pages were blank.

“A joke, Martin?”

“Nope.”

“A subtle hint then? You would like to begin a new series?”

“Nope.”

“It’s not as if we hadn’t expected it, Martin. Our story-
liners have come up with several exciting series ideas for
you. M. Subwaizee thinks that you would be perfect for the
novelizations of the Crimson Avenger holies.”

“You can stick the Crimson Avenger up your corporate ass,
Tyrena,” | said cordially. “I’m finished with Transline and this
pre-masticated gruel you call fiction.”

Tyrena’s expression did not flicker. Her teeth were not
pointed; today they were rusted iron to match the spikes on
her wrists and the collar around her neck. “Martin, Martin,
Martin,” she sighed, “you have no idea how finished you will
be if you don’t apologize, straighten up, and fly right. But
that can wait until tomorrow. Why don’t you step home,
sober up, and think about this?”

| laughed. “I’m as sober as I’ve been in eight years, lady. It
just took me awhile to realize that it wasn’t just me who’s
writing crap ... there’s not a book published in the Web this
year that hasn't been total garbage. Well, I’m getting off the
SCOW.”

Tyrena rose. For the first time | noticed that on her
simulated canvas web belt there hung a FORCE deathwand.
| hoped that it was as designer-fake as the rest of her
costume.

“Listen, you miserable, no-talent hack,” she hissed.
“Transline owns you from the balls up. If you give us any
more trouble we'll have you working in the Gothic Romance
factory under the name Rosemary Titmouse. Now go home,
sober up, and get to work on Dying Earth X.”

| smiled and shook my head.

Tyrena squinted slightly. “You’re still into us for almost a
million-mark advance,” she said. “One word to Collections
and we'll seize every room of your house except that
goddamn raft you use as an outhouse. You can sit on it until
the oceans fill up with crap.”

| laughed a final time. “It’s a self-contained disposal unit,”
| said. “Besides, | sold the house yesterday. The check for the

balance of the advance should have been transmitted by
now.”

Tyrena tapped the plastic grip of her deathwand.
“Transline’s copyrighted the Dying Earth concept, you know.
We'll just have someone else write the books.”

| nodded. “They’re welcome to it.”

Something in my ex-editor’s voice changed when she
realized that | was serious. Somewhere, | sensed, there was
an advantage to her if | stayed. “Listen,” she said, “I’m sure
we can work this out, Martin. | was saying to the director the
other day that your advances were too small and that
Transline should let you develop a new story line...”

“Tyrena, Tyrena, Tyrena,” | sighed. “Goodbye.”

| farcast to Renaissance Vector and then to Parsimony,
where | boarded a spinship for the three-week voyage to
Asquith and the crowded kingdom of Sad King Billy.

Notes for a sketch of Sad King Billy:

His Royal Highness King William XXIII, sovereign lord of
the Kingdom of Windsor-in-Exile, looks a bit like a wax
candle of a man who has been left on a hot stove. His long
hair runs in limp rivulets to slumped shoulders while the
furrows on his brow trickle downward to the tributaries of
wrinkles around the basset-hound eyes, and then run
southward again through folds and frown lines to the maze
of wattles in neck and jowls. King Billy is said to remind
anthropologists of the worry dolls of the Outback Kinshasa,
to make Zen Gnostics recall the Pitiful Buddha after the
temple fire on Tai Zhin, and to send media historians rushing
to their archives to check photos of an ancient flat-film
movie actor named Charles Laughton. None of these
references mean anything to me; | look at King Billy and
think of my long-dead tutor don Balthazar after a week-long
binge.

Sad King Billy’s reputation for gloominess is exaggerated.
He often laughs; it is merely his misfortune that his peculiar
form of laughter makes most people think he is sobbing.

A man cannot help his physiognomy, but in His Highness’s
case, the entire persona tends to suggest either “buffoon” or
“victim.” He dresses, if that can be the word, in something
approaching a constant state of anarchy, defying the taste
and color sense of his android servants, so that on some
days he clashes with himself and his environment
simultaneously. Nor is his appearance limited to sartorial
chaos—King William moves in a permanent sphere of
dishabille, his fly unsealed, his velvet cape torn and tattered
and drawing crumbs magnetically from the floor, his left
sleeve ruffle twice as long as the right, which—in turn—looks
as if it has been dipped in jam.

You get the idea.

For all this, Sad King Billy has an insightful mind and a
passion for the arts and literature which has not been
equaled since the true Renaissance days on old Old Earth.

In some ways King Billy is the fat child with his face
eternally pressed to the candy store window. He loves and
appreciates fine music but cannot produce it. A connoisseur
of ballet and all things graceful, His Highness is a klutz, a
moving series of pratfalls and comic bits of clumsiness. A
passionate reader, unerring poetry critic, and patron of
forensics, King Billy combines a stutter in his verbal
expression with a shyness which will not allow him to show
his verse or prose to anyone else.

A lifelong bachelor now entering his sixtieth year, King
Billy inhabits the tumbledown palace and two-thousand-
square-mile kingdom as if it were another suit of rumpled,
royal clothes. Anecdotes abound: one of the famous oil
painters whom King Billy supports finds His Majesty walking
head down, hands clasped behind him, one foot on the
garden path and one in the mud, obviously lost in thought.
The artist hails his patron. Sad King Billy looks up, blinks,

looks around as if awakening from a long nap. “Excuse me,”
His Highness says to the bemused painter, “b-b-but could
you p-p-please tell me—was | headed toward the palace or
away from the p-p-palace?” “Toward the palace, Your
Majesty,” replies the artist. “Oh, g-g-good,” sighs the King,
“then I’ve had lunch.”

General Horace Glennon-Height had begun his rebellion
and the Outback world of Asquith lay directly in his path of
conquest. Asquith was not worried—the Hegemony had
offered a FORCE: space fleet as a shield—but the royal ruler
of the kingdom of Monaco-in-Exile seemed more melted
than ever when he called me in.

“Martin,” said His Majesty, “you’ve h-h-heard about the b-
battle for Fomalhaut?”

“Yeah,” | said. “It doesn’t sound like anything to worry
about. Fomalhaut was just the kind of place Glennon-
Height’s been hitting ... small, no more than a few thousand
colonists, rich in minerals, and with a time-debt of at least—
what was it?—twenty standard months from the Web.”

“Twenty-three,” said Sad King Billy. “So you d-d-don’t think
that w-we are in d-d-d-jeopardy?”

“Uh-uh,” | said. “With only a three-week real-transit time
and a time-debt of less than a year, the Hegemony can
always get forces here from the Web faster than the General
can spin up from Fomalhaut.”

“Perhaps,” mused King Billy, beginning to lean on a globe
and then jumping upright as it started to turn under his
weight. “But none-the-the-less I’ve decided to start our own
m-m-modest Hegira.”

| blinked, surprised. Billy had been talking about
relocating the kingdom in exile for almost two years, but |
had never thought he would go through with it.

“The sp-sp-sp ... the ships are ready on Parvati,” he said.
“Asquith has agreed to su-su-su ... to provide the transport

we need to the Web.”

“But the palace?” | said. “The library? The farms and
grounds?”

“Donated, of course,” said King Billy, “but the contents of
the library will travel with us.”

| sat on the arm of the horsehair divan and rubbed my
cheek. In the ten years | had been in the kingdom, | had
progressed from Billy’s subject of patronage to tutor, to
confidant, to friend, but never did | pretend to understand
this disheveled enigma. Upon my arrival he had granted me
an immediate audience. “D-d-do you w-w-wish to j-j-join the
other t-t-talented people in our little colony?” he had asked.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“And w-w-will you wr-wr-write more books like the D-D-
Dying Earth?”

“Not if | can help it, Your Majesty.”

“| r-r-read it, you know,” the little man had said. “It was v-
v-very interesting.”

“You're most kind, Sir.”

“B-b-b-bullshit, M. Silenus. It w-w-was interesting because
someone had obviously b-b-bowdlerized it and left in all the
bad parts.”

| had grinned, surprised by the sudden revelation that |
was going to like Sad King Billy.

“B-b-but the Cantos,” he sighed, “th-th-that was a book.
Probably the finest volume of v-v ... poetry published in the
Web in the last two centuries. How you managed to get that
by the mediocrity police | will never know. | ordered twenty
thousand copies for the k-k-kingdom.”

| bowed my head slightly, at a loss for words for the first
time since my poststroke days two decades before.

“Will you write more p-p-poetry like the Cantos?”

“I came here to try, Your Majesty.”

“Then welcome,” said Sad King Billy. “You will stay in the
west wing of the p-p-p ... castle, near my offices, and my
door will always be open to you.”

Now | glanced at the closed door and at the little
sovereign who—even when smiling—looked as if he were on
the verge of tears. “Hyperion?” | asked. He had mentioned
the colony world-gone-primitive many times.

“Precisely. The android seedships have been there for
some years, M-M-Martin. Preparing the way, as it were.”

| raised an eyebrow. King Billy’s wealth came not from the
assets of the kingdom but from major investments in the
Web economy. Even so, if he had been carrying on a
surreptitious recolonization effort for years, the cost must
have been staggering.

“D-d-do you remember why the original colonists named
the pluh-pluh-pluh ... the world Hyperion, Martin?”

“Sure. Before the Hegira they were a tiny freehold on one
of the moons of Saturn. They couldn’t last without terrestrial
resupply, so they emigrated to the Outback and named the
survey world after their moon.”

King Billy smiled sadly. “And do you know why the name is
propitious for our endeavor?”

It took me about ten seconds to make the connection.
“Keats,” | said.

Several years earlier, near the end of a long discussion
about the essence of poetry, King Billy had asked me who
was the purest poet who had ever lived.

“The purest?” | had said. “Don’t you mean the greatest?”

“No, no,” said Billy, “that’s absurd t-t-to argue over who is
the greatest. I’m curious about your opinion of the p-p-
purest ... the closest to the essence you describe.”

| had thought about it a few days and then brought my
answer to King Billy as we watched the setting suns from the
top of the bluff near the palace. Red and blue shadows
stretched across the amber lawn toward us. “Keats,” | said.

“John Keats,” whispered Sad King Billy. “Ahh.” And then a
moment later: “Why?”

So | had told him what | knew about the nineteenth-
century Old Earth poet; about his upbringing, training, and

early death ... but mostly about a life dedicated almost
totally to the mysteries and beauties of poetic creation.

Billy had seemed interested then; he seemed obsessed
now as he waved his hand and brought into existence a holo
model which all but filled the room. | moved backward,
stepping through hills and buildings and grazing animals to
get a better view.

“Behold Hyperion, “whispered my patron. As was usually
the case when he was totally absorbed, King Billy forgot to
stutter. The holo shifted through a series of views: river
cities, port cities, mountain eyries, a city on a hill filled with
monuments to match the strange buildings in a nearby
valley.

“The Time Tombs?” | said.

“Precisely. The greatest mystery in the known universe.”

| frowned at the hyperbole. “They’re fucking empty”, |
said. “They’ve been empty since they were discovered.”

“They are the source of a strange, anti-entropic forcefield
which lingers still,” said King Billy. “One of the few
phenomena outside singularities which dares to tamper with
time itself.”

“It’s no big deal,” | said. “It must’ve been like painting rust
preventative on metal. They were made to last but they’re
empty. And since when do we go _ bugfuck about
technology?”

“Not technology,” sighed King Billy, his face melting into
deeper grooves. “Mystery. The strangeness of place so
necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the
classical Utopia and the pagan mystery.”

| shrugged, not impressed.

Sad King Billy waved the holo away. “Has your p-p-poetry
improved?”

| crossed my arms and glared at the regal dwarf-slob. “No.”

“Has your m-m-muse returned?”

| said nothing. If looks could have killed, we would all be
crying “The King is dead, long live the King!” before

nightfall.

“Very w-w-well,” he said, showing that he could look
insufferably smug as well as sad. “P-p-pack your bags, my
boy. “We're going to Hyperion.”

(Fade in)

Sad King Billy’s five seedships floating like golden
dandelions above a lapis sky. White cities rising on three
continents: Keats, Endymion, Port Romance ... the Poets’
City itself. More than eight thousand of Art’s pilgrims
seeking escape from the tyranny of mediocrity and
searching for a renewal of vision on this rough-hewn world.

Asquith and Windsor-in-Exile had been a center for
android bio-facture in the century following the Hegira, and
now these blue-skinned friends-of-man labored and tilled
with the understanding that once these final labors were
finished they were free at last. The white cities rose. The
indigenies, tired of playing native, came out of their villages
and forests and helped us rebuild the colony to more human
specifications. The technocats and bureaucrats and ecocrats
were thawed and let loose upon the unsuspecting world and
Sad King Billy’s dream came one step closer to reality.

By the time we arrived at Hyperion, General Horace
Glennon-Height was dead, his brief but brutal mutiny
already crushed, but there was no turning back.

Some of the more rugged artists and artisans spurned the
Poets’ City and eked out rugged but creative lives in
Jacktown or Port Romance, or even in the expanding
frontiers beyond, but | stayed.

| found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For
many, the expansion of distance because of limited
transportation—EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce—
and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to
absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only
one fatline transmitter—all led to a renewal of creative

energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human
and an artist.

Or so | heard.

No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically
proficient and dead as Huck Finn’s cat.

| decided to kill myself.

But first | soent some time, nine years at least, carrying
out a community service by providing the one thing new
Hyperion lacked: decadence.

From a biosculptor aptly named Graumann Hacket, |
obtained the hairy flanks, hooves, and goat legs of a satyr. |
cultivated my beard and extended my ears. Graumann
made interesting alterations to my sexual apparatus. Word
got around. Peasant girls, indigenies, the wives of our true-
blue city planners and pioneers—all awaited a visit from
Hyperion’s only resident satyr or arranged one themselves. |
learned what “priapic” and “satyriasis” really mean. Besides
the unending series of sexual contests, | allowed my
drinking bouts to become legendary and my vocabulary to
return to something approaching the old poststroke days.

It was fucking wonderful. It was fucking hell.

And then on the night | had set aside to blow my brains
out, Grendel appeared.

Notes for a sketch of our visiting monster:

Our worst dreams have come alive. Something wicked
shuns the light. Shades of Morbius and the Krell. Keep the
fires high, Mother, Grendel comes tonight.

At first we think the missing are merely absent; there are
no watchers on the walls of our city, no walls actually, no
warriors at the door of our mead hall. Then a husband
reports a wife who disappears between the evening meal
and the tucking in of their two children. Then Hoban Kristus,
the abstract implosionist, fails to appear at midweek
performance at Poets’ Amphitheatre, his first missed cue in

eighty-two years of treading the boards. Concern rises. Sad
King Billy returns from his labors as overseer on the
Jacktown restoration and promises that security will be
tightened. A sensor net is woven around the town.
ShipSecurity officers sweep the Time Tombs and report that
all remains empty. Mechs are sent into the labyrinth
entrance at the base of the Jade Tomb and report nothing in
a six-thousand-kilometer probe. Skimmers, automated and
manned, sweep the area between the city and the Bridle
Range and sense nothing larger than the heat signature of a
rock eel. For a local week there are no more disappearances.

Then the deaths begin.

The sculptor Pete Garcia is found in his studio ... and in his
bedroom ... and in the yard beyond. ShipSecurity Manager
Truin Hines is foolish enough to tell a newsteep: “It’s like he
was mauled by some vicious animal. But no animal I’ve ever
seen could do that to a man.”

We are all secretly thrilled and titillated. True, the dialogue
is bad, straight out of a million movies and holies we’ve
scared ourselves with, but now we are part of the show.

Suspicion turns toward the obvious: a psychopath is loose
among us, probably killing with a pulse-blade or hellwhip.
This time he (or she) had not found time to dispose of the
body. Poor Pete.

ShipSecurity Manager Hines is sacked and City Manager
Pruett receives permission from His Majesty to hire, train,
and arm a city police force of approximately twenty officers.
There is talk of truth-testing the entire Poets’ City population
of six thousand. Sidewalk cafes buzz with conversation of
civil rights ... we were technically out of the Hegemony—did
we have any rights? ... and harebrained schemes are
hatched to catch the murderer.

Then the slaughter begins.

There was no pattern to the murders. Bodies were found in
twos and threes, or alone, or not at all. Some of the
disappearances were bloodless; others left gallons of gore.
There were no witnesses, no survivors of attacks. Location
did not seem to matter: the Weimont family lived in one of
the outlying villas hut Sira Rob never stirred from her tower
studio near the center of town; two of the victims
disappeared alone, at night, apparently while walking in the
Zen Garden, but Chancellor Lehman’s daughter had private
bodyguards yet vanished while alone in a bathroom on the
seventh floor of Sad King Billy’s palace.

On Lusus or Tau Ceti Center or a dozen other of the old
Web worlds, the deaths of a thousand people add up to
minor news—items for datasphere short-term or the inside
pages of the morning paper—but in a city of six thousand on
a colony of fifty thousand, a dozen murders—like the
proverbial sentence to be hanged in the morning—tend to
focus one’s attention wonderfully well.

| knew one of the first victims. Sissipriss Harris had been
one of my first conquests as a satyr—and one of my most
enthusiastic—a beautiful girl, long blond hair too soft to be
real, a fresh-picked-peach complexion too virginal to dream
of touching, a beauty too perfect to believe: precisely the
sort that even the most timid male dreams of violating.
Sissipriss now had been violated in earnest. They found only
her head, lying upright in the center of Lord Byron’s Plaza as
if she had been buried to her neck in pourable marble. |
knew when | heard these details precisely what kind of
creature we were dealing with, for a cat | had owned on
Mother’s estate had left similar offerings on the south patio
most summer mornings—the head of a mouse staring up
from the sandstone in pure rodent amazement, or perhaps a
ground squirrel’s toothy grin—killing trophies from a proud
but hungry predator.

Sad King Billy came to visit me while | was working on my
Cantos.

“Good morning, Billy,” | said.

“It’s Your Majesty,” grumped His Majesty in a rare show of
royal pique. His stutter had disappeared the day the royal
dropship landed on Hyperion.

“Good morning, Billy, Your Majesty.”

“Hnnrh,” growed my liege lord, moving some papers and
managing to sit in the only puddle of spilled coffee on an
otherwise dry bench. “You’re writing again, Silenus.”

| saw no reason to acknowledge an acknowledgment of the
obvious.

“Have you always used a pen?”

“No,” | said, “only when I want to write something worth
reading.”

“Is that worth reading?” He gestured toward the small
heap of manuscript | had accrued in two local weeks of work.

“Yes.”

“Yes? Just yes?”

“Yes.”

“Will | get to read it soon?”

“No.”

King Billy looked down and noticed that his left leg was in
a puddle of coffee. He frowned, moved, and mopped at the
shrinking pool with the hem of his cape. “Never?” he said.

“Not unless you outlive me.”

“Which | plan to do,” said the King. “While you expire from
playing goat to the kingdom’s ewes.”

“Is that an attempt at a metaphor?”

“Not in the least,” said King Billy. “Merely an observation.”

“| haven’t forced my attentions on a ewe since my
boyhood days on the farm,” | said. “I promised my mother in
song that | wouldn’t indulge in sheep fucking again without
asking her permission.” While King Billy looked on

mournfully, | sang a few bars of an ancient ditty called
“There'll Never Be Another Ewe.”

“Martin,” he said, “Someone or something is killing my
people.”

| set aside my paper and pen. “I know,” | said.

“| need your help.”

“How, for Christ’s sake? Am | supposed to track down the
killer like some HTV detective? Have a fight to the fucking
death on Reichenbach fucking Falls?”

“That would be satisfactory, Martin. But in the meantime a
few opinions and words of advice would suffice.”

“Opinion One,” | said, “it was stupid to come here. Opinion
Two, it’s stupid to stay. Advice Alpha/Omega: leave.”

King Billy nodded dolefully. “Leave this city or all of
Hyperion?”

| shrugged.

His Majesty rose and walked to the window of my small
study. It looked out across a three-meter alley to the brick
wall of the automated recycling plant next door. King Billy
studied the view. “You're aware,” he said, “of the ancient
legend of the Shrike?”

“I’ve heard bits of it.”

“The indigenies associate the monster with the Time
Tombs,” he said.

“The indigenies smear paint on their bellies for the harvest
celebration and smoke unrecombinant tobacco,” | said.

King Billy nodded at the wisdom of this. He said: “The
Hegemony Firstdown Team was wary of this area. They set
up the multichannel recorders and kept their bases south of
the Bridle.”

“Look,” | said, “Your Majesty ... what do you want?
Absolution for screwing up and building the city here? You’re
absolved. Go and sin no more, my son. Now, if you don’t
mind, Your Royalship, adiós. I’ve got dirty limericks to write
here.”

King Billy did not turn away from the window. “You
recommend that we evacuate the city, Martin?”

| hesitated only a second. “Sure.”

“And would you leave with the rest?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

King Billy turned and looked me in the eye. “Would you?”

| said nothing. After a minute | looked away.

“| thought so,” said the ruler of the planet. He clasped his
pudgy hands behind his back and stared at the wall again.
“If | were a detective,” he said, “I would be suspicious. The
city’s least productive citizen starts writing again after a
decade of silence only ... what, Martin? ... two days after the
first murders happened. Now he’s disappeared from the
social life he once dominated and spends his time
composing an epic poem ... shy, even the young girls are
safe from his goatish ardor.”

| sighed. “Goatish ardor, m’lord?”

King Billy glanced over his shoulder at me.

“All right,” | said. “You’ve got me. | confess. I’ve been
murdering them and bathing in their blood. It works as a
fucking literary aphrodisiac. | figure two ... three hundred
more victims; tops ... and l'Il have my next Book ready for
publication.”

King Billy turned back to the window.

“What’s the matter,” | said, “don’t you believe me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” said the King, “I know who the murderer is.”

We sat in the darkened holopit and watched the Shrike kill
novelist Sira Rob and her lover. The light level was very low;
Sira’s middle-aged flesh seemed to glow with a pale
phosphorescence while her much younger boyfriend’s white
buttocks gave the illusion in the dim light of floating
separately from the rest of his tanned body. Their

lovemaking was reaching its frenzied peak when the
inexplicable occurred. Rather than the final thrusts and
sudden pause of orgasm, the young man seemed to levitate
up and backward, rising into the air as if Sira had somehow
forcefully ejected him from her body. The sound track on the
disk, previously consisting of the usual banal pants, gasps,
exhortations, and instructions one would expect from such
activity, suddenly filled the holopit with screams—first the
young man’s, then Sira’s.

There was a thud as the boy’s body struck a wall off
camera. Sira’s body lay waiting in tragically comic
vulnerability, her legs wide, arms open, breasts flattened,
thighs pale. Her head had been thrown back in ecstasy but
now she had time to raise it, shock and anger already
replacing the oddly similar expression of imminent orgasm.
She opened her mouth to shout something.

No words. There came the watermelon-carving sound of
blades piercing flesh, of hooks being pulled free of tendon
and bone. Sira’s head went back, her mouth opened
impossibly wide, and her body exploded from the
breastbone down. Flesh separated as if an invisible ax were
chopping Sira Rob for kindling. Unseen scalpels completed
the job of opening her, lateral incisions appearing like
obscene time-lapse footage of a mad surgeon’s favorite
operation. It was a brutal autopsy performed on a living
person. On a once living person, rather, for when the blood
stopped flying and the body ceased spasming, Sira’s limbs
relaxed in death, legs opening again in an echo of the
obscene display of viscera above. And then—for the briefest
second—there was a blur of red and chrome near the bed.

“Freeze, expand, and augment,” King Billy told the house
computer.

The blur resolved itself into a head out of a jolt addict’s
nightmare: a face part steel, part chrome, and part skull,
teeth like a mechanized wolf’s crossed with a steam shovel,

eyes like ruby lasers burning through blood-filled gems,
forehead penetrated by a curved spike-blade rising thirty
centimeters from a quicksilver skull, and a neck ringed with
similar thorns.

“The Shrike?” | asked.

King Billy nodded—the merest movement of chin and
jowls.

“What happened to the boy?” | asked.

“There was no sign of him when Sira’s body was
discovered,” said the King. “No one knew he was missing
until this disk was discovered. He has been identified as a
young recreation specialist from Endymion.”

“You just found the holo?”

“Yesterday,” said King Billy. “The security people found the
imager on the ceiling. Less than a millimeter across. Sira had
a library of such disks. The camera apparently was there
only to record... ah...”

“The bedroom follies,” | said.

“Precisely.”

| stood up and approached the floating image of the
creature. My hand passed through forehead, spike, and jaws.
The computer had calculated its size and represented it
properly. Judging from the thing’s head, our local Grendel
stood more than three meters tall. “Shrike,” | muttered, more
in greeting than in identification.

“What can you tell me about it, Martin?”

“Why ask me?” | snapped. “I’m a poet, not a
mythohistorian.”

“You accessed the seedship computer with a query about
the Shrike’s nature and origins.”

| raised an eyebrow. Computer access was supposed to be
as private and anonymous as datasphere entry in the
Hegemony. “So what?” | said. “Hundreds of people must
have checked out the Shrike legend since the killings began.
Maybe thousands. It’s the only fucking monster legend
we've got.”

King Billy moved his wrinkles and folds up and down.
“Yes,” he said, “but you searched the files three months
before the first disappearance.”

| sighed and slumped into the holopit cushions. “All right,”
| said, “I did. So what? | wanted to use the fucking legend in
the fucking poem I’m writing, so | researched it. Arrest me.”

“What did you learn?”

| was very angry now. | stamped satyr hooves into the soft
carpet. “Just the stuff in the fucking file,” | snapped. “What
in the hell do you want from me, Billy?”

The King rubbed his brow and winced as he accidentally
stuck his little finger in his eye. “I don’t know,” he said. “The
security people wanted to take you up to the ship and put
you on full interrogative interface. | chose to talk to you
instead.”

| blinked, feeling a strange zero-g sensation in my
stomach. Full interrogative meant cortical shunts and
sockets in the skull. Most people interrogated that way
recovered fully. Most.

“Can you tell me what aspect of the Shrike legend you
planned to use in your poem?” King Billy asked softly.

“Sure,” | said. “According to the Shrike Cult gospel that the
indigenies started, the Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the
Angel of Final Atonement, come from a place beyond time to
announce the end of the human race. | liked that conceit.”

“The end of the human race,” repeated King Billy.

“Yeah. He’s Michael the Archangel and Moroni and Satan
and Masked Entropy and the Frankenstein monster all rolled
into one package,” | said. “He hangs around the Time Tombs
waiting to come out and wreak havoc when it’s mankind’s
time to join the dodo and the gorilla and the sperm whale on
the extinction Hit Parade list.”

“The Frankenstein monster,” mused the short little fat man
in the wrinkled cape. “Why him?”

| took a breath. “Because the Shrike Cult believes that
mankind somehow created the thing,” | said, although |

knew that King Billy knew everything | knew and more.

“Do they know how to kill it?” he asked.

“Not that | know of. He’s supposed to be immortal, beyond
time.”

“A god?”

| hesitated. “Not really,” | said at last. “More like one of the
universe’s worst nightmares come to life. Sort of like the
Grim Reaper, but with a penchant for sticking souls on a
giant thorn tree ... while the people’s souls are still in their
bodies.”

King Billy nodded.

“Look,” | said, “if you insist on splitting hairs from back-
world theologies, why don’t you fly to Jacktown and ask a
few of the Cult priests?”

“Yes,” said the King, chin on his pudgy fist, obviously
distracted, “they’re already on the _ seedship being
interrogated. It’s all most confusing.”

| rose to leave, not sure if | would be allowed to.

“Martin?”

“Yeah.”

“Before you go, can you think of anything else that could
help us understand this thing?”

| paused in the doorway, feeling my heart batting at my
ribs to get out. “Yeah,” | said, my voice only marginally
steady. “I can tell you who and what the Shrike really is.”

“Oh?”

“It’s my muse,” | said, and turned, and went back to my
room to write.

Of course | had summoned the Shrike. | knew that. | had
summoned it by beginning my epic poem about it. In the
beginning was the Word.

| retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos. It was not about

the planet but about the passing of the self-styled Titans
called humans. It was about the unthinking hubris of a race

which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer
carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to
the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity
had helped to sire. Hyperion was the first serious work | had
done in many years and it was the best | would ever do.
What began as a comic-serious homage to the ghost of John
Keats became my last reason for existence, an epic tour de
force in an age of mediocre farce. Hyperion Cantos was
written with a skill | could never have attained, with a
mastery | could never have gained, and sung in a voice
which was not mine. The passing of humankind was my
topic. The Shrike was my muse.

A score more people died before King Billy evacuated the
City of Poets. Some of the evacuees went to Endymion or
Keats or one of the other new cities, but most voted to take
the seedships back to the Web. King Billy’s dream of a
creative utopia died, although the King himself lived on in
the gloomy palace at Keats. Leadership of the colony passed
to the Home Rule Council, which petitioned the Hegemony
for membership and immediately established a Self-defense
Force. The SDF—made up primarily of the same indigenies
who had been cudgeling each other a decade before, but
commanded now by self-styled officers from our new colony
—succeeded only in disturbing the peacefulness of the night
with their automated skimmer patrols and marring the
beauty of the returning desert with their mobile surveillance
mechs.

Surprisingly, | was not the only one to stay behind; at least
two hundred remained, although most of us avoided social
contact, smiling politely when we passed on Poets’ Walk or
while we ate apart in the echoing emptiness of the dining
dome.

The murders and disappearances continued, averaging
about one a local fortnight, although they were usually
discovered not by us but by the regional SDF commander,
who demanded a head count of citizens every few weeks.

The image that remains in my mind from that first year is
an unusually communal one: the night we gathered on the
Commons to watch the seedship leave. It was at the height
of the autumn meteor season and Hyperion’s night skies
were already ablaze with gold streaks and red crisscrosses of
flame when the seedship’s engines fired, a small sun flared,
and for an hour we watched as friends and fellow artists
receded as a Streak of fusion flame. Sad King Billy joined us
that night and | remember that he looked at me before he
solemnly reentered his ornate coach to return to the safety
of Keats.

° d ka

In the dozen years which followed | left the city only half a
dozen times; once to find a biosculptor who could rid me of
my satyr affectation, the other times to buy food and
supplies. The Shrike Temple had renewed the Shrike
pilgrimages by this time, and on my trips | would use their
elaborate avenue to death in reverse—the walk to Chronos
Keep, the aerial tram across the Bridle Range, the
windwagons, and the Charon barge down the Hoolie.
Coming back, | would stare at the pilgrims and wonder who
would survive.

Few visited the City of Poets. Our half-finished towers
began to look like tumbled ruins. The gallerias with their
splendid metal-glass domes and covered arcades grew
heavy with vines; pyreweed and scargrass poked up
between the flagstones. The SDF added to the chaos, setting
mines and booby traps to kill the Shrike, but only
succeeding in devastating once beautiful sections of the
city. Irrigation broke down. The aqueduct collapsed. The
desert encroached. | moved from room to room in King Billy’s
abandoned palace, working on my poem, waiting for my
muse.

When you think about it, the cause-effect begins to
resemble some mad logic-loop by the data artist Carolus or
perhaps a print by Escher: the Shrike had come into
existence because of the incantatory powers of my poem but
the poem could not have existed without the
threat/presence of the Shrike as muse. Perhaps | was a bit
mad in those days.

In a dozen years sudden death culled the city of
dilettantes until only the Shrike and | remained. The annual
passage of the Shrike Pilgrimage was a minor irritation, a
distant caravan crossing the desert to the Time Tombs.
Sometimes a few figures returned, fleeing across vermilion
sands to the refuge of Chronos Keep twenty kilometers to
the southwest. More often, no one emerged.

| watched from the shadows of the city. My hair and beard
had grown until they covered some of the rags | wore. | came
out mostly at night, moving through the ruins like a furtive
shadow, sometimes gazing at my lighted palace tower like
David Hume peering in his own windows and solemnly
deciding that he wasn’t home. | never moved the food
synthesizer from the dining dome to my apartments,
preferring instead to eat in the echoing silence under that
cracked duomo like some addled Eloi fattening himself up
for the inevitable Morlock.

| never saw the Shrike. Many nights, just before dawn, |
would awaken from a nap at a sudden sound—the scratch of
metal on stone, the rasp of sand under something’s foot—
but although | was often sure that | was being watched, |
never saw the watcher.

Occasionally | made the short trip to the Time Tombs,
especially at night, avoiding the soft, disconcerting tugs of
the anti-entropic time tides while | moved through
complicated shadows under the wings of the Sphinx or
stared at stars through the emerald wall of the Jade Tomb. It

was upon my return from one of these nocturnal pilgrimages
that | found an intruder in my study.

“Impressive, M-M-M-Martin,” said King Billy, tapping one of
several heaps of manuscript which lay about the room.
Seated in the oversized chair at the long table, the failed
monarch looked old, more melted than ever. It was obvious
that he had been reading for several hours. “Do you r-r-really
think that mankind d-d-d-deserves such an end?” he asked
softly. It had been a dozen years since | had heard the
stutter.

| moved away from the door but did not answer. Billy had
been a friend and patron for more than twenty standard
years, but at that moment | could have killed him. The
thought of someone reading Hyperion without permission
filled me with rage.

“You d-d-date your p-p-p ... cantos?” said King Billy, riffling
through the most recent stack of completed pages.

“How did you get here?” | snapped. It was not an idle
question. Skimmers, dropships, and helicopters had not had
much luck flying to the Time Tombs region in recent years.
The machines arrived sans passengers. It had done wonders
in fueling the Shrike myth.

The little man in the rumpled cape shrugged. His uniform
was meant to be brilliant and regal but merely made him
look like an overweight Harlequin. “I followed the last batch
of pilgrims,” he said. “And then c-c-came down from Keep
Chronos to visit. | notice that you’ve written nothing in many
months, M-M-Martin. Can you explain that?”

| glowered in silence while sidling closer.

“Perhaps | can explain it,” said King Billy. He looked at the
last completed page of Hyperion Cantos as if it had the
answer to a long-puzzled riddle. “The last stanzas were
written the same week last year that J. T. Telio disappeared.”

“So?” | had moved to the far edge of the table now.
Feigning a casual attitude, | pulled a short stack of

manuscript pages closer and moved them out of Billy’s
reach.

“So that w-w-w-was.... according to the SDF
monitors ... the d-d-date of the death of the last remaining
Poets’ City dweller,” he said. “The last except for y-y-you,
that is, Martin.”

| shrugged and began moving around the table. | needed
to get to Billy without getting the manuscript in the way.

“You know, you haven't f-f-f-finished it, Martin,” he said in
his deep, sad voice. “There is still some chance that
humanity s-s-s-Ssurvives the Fall.”

“No,” | said and sidled closer.

“But you can’t write it, can you, Martin? You can’t c-c-c-
compose this poetry unless your m-m-muse is shedding
blood, can you?”

“Bullshit,” | said.

“Perhaps. But a fascinating coincidence. Have you ever
wondered why you have been spared, Martin?”

| shrugged again and slid another stack of papers out of
his reach. | was taller, stronger, and meaner than Billy, but |
had to be sure that none of the manuscript would be
damaged if he struggled as | lifted him out of his seat and
threw him out.

“It’s t-t-t-time we did something about this problem,” said
my patron.

“No,” | said, “it’s time you left.” | shoved the last stacks of
poetry aside and raised my arms, surprised to see a brass
candlestick in one hand.

“Stop right there, please,” King Billy said softly and lifted a
neural stunner from his lap.

| paused only a second. Then | laughed. “You miserable
little hangdog fraud,” | said. “You couldn’t use a fucking
weapon if your life depended on it.”

| stepped forward to beat him up and throw him out.

My cheek was against the stone of the courtyard but one
eye was open enough for me to see that stars still shone
through the broken latticework of the galleria dome. | could
not blink. My limbs and torso tingled with the pinpricks of
returning sensation, as if my entire body had fallen asleep
and was now coming painfully awake. It made me want to
scream, but my jaw and tongue refused to work. Suddenly |
was lifted and propped against a stone bench so that | could
see the courtyard and the dry fountain which Rithmet
Corbet had designed. The bronze Laocoon wrestled with
bronze snakes in the flickering illumination of the predawn
meteor showers.

“I’m s-s-sorry, Martin,” came a familiar voice, “b-b-but this
m-m-madness has to end.” King Billy came into my field of
view carrying a tall stack of manuscript. Other heaps of
pages lay on the shelf of the fountain at the foot of the
metal Trojan. An open bucket of kerosene sat nearby.

| managed to blink. My eyelids moved like rusted iron.

“The stun should w-w-wear off any s-s-s ... any minute,”
said King Billy. He reached into the fountain, raised a sheaf
of manuscript, and ignited it with a flick of his cigarette
lighter.

“No!” | managed to scream through clenched jaws.

The flames danced and died. King Billy let the ashes drop
into the fountain and lifted another stack of pages, rolling
them into a cylinder. Tears glistened on lined cheeks
illuminated by flame. “You c-c-called it f-f-forth,” gasped the
little man. “It must be f-f-finished.”

| struggled to rise. My arms and legs jerked like a
marionette’s mishandled limbs. The pain was incredible. |
screamed again and the agonized sound echoed from
marble and granite.

King Billy lifted a fat sheaf of papers and paused to read
from the top page:

“Without story or prop
But my own weak mortality, | bore
The load of this eternal quietude,
The unchanging gloom, and the three fixed shapes
Ponderous upon my senses a whole moon.
For by my burning brain | measured sure
Her silver seasons shedded on the night
And ever day by day I thought | grew
More gaunt and ghostly—Oftentimes | prayed,
Intense, that Death would take me from the vale
And all its burdens—Gasping with despair
Of change, hour after hour | cursed myself.”

King Billy raised his face to the stars and consigned this
page to flame.

“No!” | cried again and forced my legs to bend. | got to one
knee, tried to steady myself with an arm ablaze with
pinpricks, and fell on my side.

The shadow in the cape lifted a stack too thick to roll and
peered at it in the dim light.

“Then I saw a wan face
Not pinned by human sorrows, but bright blanched
By an immortal sickness which kills not;
It works a constant change, which happy death
Can put no end to; deathwards progressing
To no death was that visage; it had passed
The lily and the snow; and beyond these
I must not think now, though I saw that face ...”

King Billy moved his lighter and this and fifty other pages
burst into flame. He dropped the burning papers into the
fountain and reached for more.

“Please!” | cried and pulled myself up, stiffening my legs
against the twitches of random nerve impulses while leaning
against the stone bench. “Please.”

The third figure did not actually appear so much as allow
its presence to impinge upon my consciousness; it was as if
it always had been there and King Billy and | had failed to
notice it until the flames grew bright enough. Impossibly
tall, four-armed, molded in chrome and cartilage, the Shrike
turned its red gaze on us.

King Billy gasped, stepped back, and then moved forward
to feed more cantos to the fire. Embers rose on warm drafts.
A flight of doves burst from the vine-choked girders of the
broken dome with an explosion of wing sound.

| moved forward in a motion more lurch than step. The
Shrike did not move, did not shift its bloody gaze.

“Go!” cried King Billy, stutter forgotten, voice exalted, a
blazing mass of poetry in each hand. “Return to the pit from
whence you came!”

The Shrike seemed to incline its head ever so slightly. Red
light gleamed on sharp surfaces.

“My lord!” | cried, although to King Billy or the apparition
from hell | did not Know then and know not now. | staggered
the last few paces and reached for Billy’s arm.

He was not there. One second the aging King was a hand’s
length from me and in the next instant he was ten meters
away, raised high above the courtyard stones. Fingers like
steel thorns pierced his arms and chest and thighs, but he
still writhed and my Cantos burned in his fists. The Shrike
held him out like a father offering his son for baptism.

“Destroy it!” Billy cried, his pinned arms making pitiful
gestures. “Destroy it!”

| stopped at the fountain’s edge, tottered weakly against
the rim. At first | thought he meant destroy the Shrike ... and
then | thought he meant the poem ... and then | realized
that he meant both. A thousand pages and more of
manuscript lay tumbled in the dry fountain. | picked up the
bucket of kerosene.

The Shrike did not move except to pull King Billy slowly
back against his chest in an oddly affectionate motion. Billy

writhed and screamed silently as a long steel thorn emerged
from his harlequin silk just above the breastbone. | stood
there stupidly and thought of butterfly collections | had
displayed as a child. Slowly, mechanically, | sloshed
kerosene on the scattered pages.

“End it!” gasped King Billy. “Martin, for the love of God!”

| picked up the lighter from where he had dropped it. The
Shrike made no move. Blood soaked the black patches of
Billy’s tunic until they blended with the crimson squares
already there. | thumbed the antique lighter once, twice, a
third time; sparks only. Through my tears | could see my
life’s work lying in the dusty fountain. | dropped the lighter.

Billy screamed. Dimly, | heard blades rubbing bone as he
twisted in the Shrike’s embrace. “Finish it!” he cried.
“Martin ... oh, God!”

| turned then, took five fast paces, and threw the half-full
bucket of kerosene. Fumes blurred my already blurred
vision. Billy and the impossible creature that held him were
soaked like two comics in a slapstick holie. | saw Billy blink
and splutter, | saw the slickness on the Shrike’s chiseled
muzzle reflect the meteor-brightened sky, and then the
dying embers of burned pages in Billy’s still clenched fists
ignited the kerosene.

| raised my hands to protect my face—too late, beard and
eyebrows singed and smoldered—and staggered backward
until the rim of the fountain stopped me.

For a second the pyre was a perfect sculpture of flame, a
blue and yellow Pietà with a fourrarmed madonna holding a
blazing Christ figure. Then the burning figure writhed and
arched, still pinned by steel thorns and a score of scalpeled
talons, and a cry went up which to this day | cannot believe
emanated from the human half of that death-embraced pair.
The scream knocked me to my knees, echoed from every
hard surface in the city, and drove the pigeons into wheeling
panic. And the scream continued for minutes after the
flaming vision simply ceased to be, leaving behind neither

ashes nor retinal image. It was another minute or two before
| realized that the scream | now heard was mine.

Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real
life seldom structures a decent denouement.

It took me several months, perhaps a year, to recopy the
kerosene-damaged pages and to rewrite the burned Cantos.
It will be no surprise to learn that | did not finish the poem. It
was not by choice. My muse had fled.

The City of Poets decayed in peace. | stayed another year
or two—perhaps five, | do not know; | was quite mad by
then. To this day records of early Shrike pilgrims tell of the
gaunt figure, all hair and rags and bulging eyes, who would
wake them from their Gethsemane sleep by screaming
obscenities and shaking his fist at the silent Time Tombs,
daring the coward within to show itself.

Eventually the madness burned itself out—although the
embers will always glow—and | hiked the fifteen hundred
kilometers to civilization, my backpack weighted down with
just manuscript, surviving on rock eels and snow and on
nothing at all for the last ten days.

The two and a half centuries since are not worth telling,
much less reliving. The Poulsen treatments to keep the
instrument alive and waiting. Two long, cold sleeps in illegal,
sublight, cryogenic voyages; each swallowing a century or
more; each taking its toll in brain cells and memory.

| waited then. | wait still. The poem must be finished. It will
be finished.

In the beginning was the Word.

In the end ... past honor, past life, past caring ...

In the end will be the Word.

The Benares put into Edge a little after noon on the next
day. One of the mantas had died in harness only twenty
kilometers downriver from their destination and A. Bettik
had cut it loose. The other had lasted until they tied up to
the bleached pier and then it rolled over in total exhaustion,
bubbles rising from its twin airholes. Bettik ordered this
manta cut loose as well, explaining that it had a slim chance
of surviving if it drifted along in the more rapid current.

The pilgrims had been awake and watching the scenery
roll by since before sunrise. They spoke little and none had
found anything to say to Martin Silenus. The poet did not
appear to mind ... he drank wine with his breakfast and sang
bawdy songs as the sun rose.

The river had widened during the night and by morning it
was a two-kilometer-wide highway of blue gray cutting
through the low green hills south of the Sea of Grass. There
were no trees this close to the Sea, and the browns and
golds and heather tones of the Mane shrubs had gradually
brightened to the bold greens of the two-meter-tall northern
grasses. All morning the hills had been pressed lower until
now they were compressed into low bands of grassy bluffs
on either side of the river. An almost invisible darkening
hung above the horizon to the north arid east, and those
pilgrims who had lived on ocean worlds and knew it as a
promise of the approaching sea had to remind themselves
that the only sea now near was comprised of several billion
acres of grass.

Edge never had been a large outpost and now it was
totally deserted. The score of buildings lining the rutted lane

from the dock had the vacant gaze of all abandoned
structures and there were signs on the riverfront that the
population had fled weeks earlier. The Pilgrims’ Rest, a
three-century-old inn just below the crest of the hill, had
been burned.

A. Bettik accompanied them to the summit of the low
bluff. “What will you do now?” Colonel Kassad asked the
android.

“According to the terms of the Temple bonditure, we are
free after this trip,” said Bettik. “We shall leave the Benares
here for your return and take the launch downriver. And then
we go on Our way.”

“With the general evacuations?” asked Brawne Lamia.

“No.” Bettik smiled. “We have our own purposes and
pilgrimages on Hyperion.”

The group reached the rounded crest of the bluff Behind
them, the Benares seemed a small thing tied to a sagging
dock; the Hoolie ran southwest into the blue haze of
distance below the town and curved west above it,
narrowing toward the impassable Lower Cataracts a dozen
kilometers upriver from Edge. To their north and east lay the
Sea of Grass.

“My God,” breathed Brawne Lamia.

It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation. Below
them, a scattering of docks, wharves, and sheds marked the
end of Edge and the beginning of the Sea. Grass stretched
away forever, rippling sensuously in the slight breeze and
seeming to lap like a green surf at the base of the bluffs. The
grass seemed infinite and seamless, stretching to all
horizons and apparently rising to precisely the same height
as far as the eye could see. There was not the slightest hint
of the snowy peaks of the Bridle Range, which they knew lay
some eight hundred kilometers to the northeast. The illusion
that they were gazing at a great green sea was nearly
perfect, down to the wind-ruffled shimmers of stalks looking
like whitecaps far from shore.

“Its beautiful,” said Lamia, who had never seen it before.

“It’s striking at sunset and sunrise,” said the Consul.

“Fascinating,” murmured Sol Weintraub, lifting his infant
so that she could see. She wiggled in happiness and
concentrated on watching her fingers.

“A well-preserved ecosystem,” Het Masteen said
approvingly. “The Muir would be pleased.”

“Shit,” said Martin Silenus.

The others turned to stare.

“There’s no fucking windwagon,” said the poet.

The four other men, woman, and android stared silently at
the abandoned wharves and empty plain of grass.

“It’s been delayed,” said the Consul.

Martin Silenus barked a laugh. “Or it’s left already. We
were supposed to be here last night.”

Colonel Kassad raised his powered binoculars and swept
the horizon. “I find it unlikely that they would have left
without us,” he said. “The wagon was to have been sent by
the Shrike Temple priests themselves. They have a vested
interest in our pilgrimage.”

“We could walk,” said Lenar Hoyt. The priest looked pale
and weak, obviously in the grip of both pain and drugs, and
barely able to stand, much less walk.

“No,” said Kassad. “It’s hundreds of klicks and the grass is
over our heads.”

“Compasses,” said the priest.

“Compasses don’t work on Hyperion,” said Kassad, still
watching through his binoculars.

“Direction finders then,” said Hoyt.

“We have an IDF, but that isn’t the point,” said the Consul.
“The grass is sharp. Half a klick out and we’d be nothing but
tatters.”

“And there are the grass serpents,” said Kassad, lowering
the glasses. “It’s a well-preserved ecosystem but not one to
take a stroll in.”

Father Hoyt sighed and half collapsed into the short grass
of the hilltop. There was something close to relief in his
voice When he said, “All right, we go back.”

A. Bettik stepped forward. “The crew will be happy to wait
and ferry you back to Keats in the Benares should the
windwagon not appear.”

“No,” said the Consul, “take the launch and go.”

“Hey, just a fucking minute!” cried Martin Silenus. “I don’t
remember electing you dictator, amigo. We need to get
there. If the fucking windwagon doesn’t show, we’ll have to
find another way.”

The Consul wheeled to face the smaller man. “How? By
boat? It takes two weeks to sail up the Mane and around the
North Littoral to Otho or one of the other staging areas. And
that’s when there are ships available. Every seagoing vessel
on Hyperion is probably evolved in the evacuation effort.”

“Dirigible then,” growled the poet.

Brawne Lamia laughed. “Oh, yes. We’ve seen so many in
the two days we've been on the river.”

Martin Silenus whirled and clenched his fists as if to strike
the woman. Then he smiled. “All right then, lady, what do we
do? Maybe if we sacrifice someone to a grass serpent the
transportation gods will smile on us.”

Brawne Lamia’s stare was arctic. “I thought burned
offerings were more your style, little man.”

Colonel Kassad stepped between the two. His voice barked
command. “Enough. The Consul’s right. We stay here until
the wagon arrives. M. Masteen, M. Lamia, go with A. Bettik to
supervise the unloading of our gear. Father Hoyt and M.
Silenus will bring some wood up for a bonfire.”

“A bonfire?” said the priest. It was hot on the hillside.

“After dark,” said Kassad. “We want the windwagon to
know we're here. Now let’s move.”

It was a quiet group that watched the powered launch move
downriver at sunset. Even from two kilometers away the
Consul could see the blue skins of the crew. The Benares
looked old and abandoned at its wharf, already a part of the
deserted city. When the launch was lost in the distance, the
group turned to watch the Sea of Grass. Long shadows from
the river bluffs crept out across what the Consul already
found himself thinking of as the surf and shallows. Farther
out, the sea seemed to shift in color, the grass mellowing to
an aquamarine shimmer before darkening to a hint of
verdurous depths. The lapis sky melted into the reds and
golds of sunset, illuminating their hilltop and setting the
pilgrims’ skins aglow with liquid light. The only sound was
the whisper of wind in grass.

“We've got a fucking huge heap of baggage,” Martin
Silenus said loudly. “For a bunch of folks on a one-way trip.”

It was true, thought the Consul. Their luggage made a
small mountain on the grassy hilltop.

“Somewhere in there,” came the quiet voice of Het
Masteen, “may lie our salvation.”

“What do you mean?” asked Brawne Lamia.

“Yeah,” said Martin Silenus, lying back, putting his hands
under his head, and staring at the sky. “Did you bring a pair
of undershorts that are Shrikeproof?”

The Templar shook his head slowly. The sudden twilight
cast his face in shadow under the cowl of the robe. “Let us
not trivialize or dissemble,” he said. “It is time to admit that
each of us has brought on this pilgrimage something which
he or she hopes will alter the inevitable outcome when the
moment arrives that we must face the Lord of Pain.”

The poet laughed. “I didn’t bring even my lucky fucking
rabbit’s foot.”

The Templar’s hood moved slightly. “But your manuscript
perhaps?”

The poet said nothing.

”

Het Masteen moved his invisible gaze to the tall man on
his left. “And you, Colonel, there are several trunks which
bear your name. Weapons, perhaps?”

Kassad raised his head but did not speak.

“Of course,” said Het Masteen, “it would be foolish to go
hunting without a weapon.”

“What about me?” asked Brawne Lamia, folding her arms.
“Do you know what secret weapon I’ve smuggled along?”

The Templar’s oddly accented voice was calm. “We have
not yet heard your tale, M. Lamia. It would be premature to
speculate.”

“What about the Consul?” asked Lamia.

“Oh, yes, it is obvious what weapon our diplomatic friend
has in store.”

The Consul turned from his contemplation of the sunset. “l
brought only some clothes and two books to read,” he said
truthfully.

“Ah,” sighed the Templar, “but what a beautiful spacecraft
you left behind.”

Martin Silenus jumped to his feet. “The fucking ship!” he
cried. “You can call it, can’t you? Well, goddammit, get your
dog whistle out, I’m tired of sitting here.”

The Consul pulled a strand of grass and stripped it. After a
minute he said:

“Even if | could call it ... and you heard A. Bettik say that
the comsats and repeater stations were down ... even if |
could call it, we couldn’t land north of the Bridle Range. That
meant instant disaster even before the Shrike began
ranging south of the mountains.”

“Yeah,” said Silenus, waving his arms in agitation, “but we
could get across this fucking ... /Jawn/ Call the ship.”

“Wait until morning,” said the Consul. “If the windwagon’s
not here, we will discuss alternatives.”

“Fuck that ...” began the poet, but Kassad stepped forward
with his back to him, effectively removing Silenus from the
circle.

“M. Masteen,” said the Colonel, “what is your secret?”

There was enough light from the dying sky to show a slight
smile on the Templar’s thin lips. He gestured toward the
mound of baggage. “As you see, my trunk is the heaviest
and most mysterious of all.”

“It’s a Mobius cube,” said Father Hoyt. “I’ve seen ancient
artifacts transported that way.”

“Or fusion bombs,” said Kassad.

Het Masteen shook his head. “Nothing so crude,” he said.

“Are you going to tell us?” demanded Lamia.

“When it is my turn to speak,” said the Templar.

“Are you next?” asked the Consul. “We can listen while we
wait.”

Sol Weintraub cleared his throat. “I have number 4,” he
said, showing the slip of paper. “But | would be more than
pleased to trade with the True Voice of the Tree.” Weintraub
lifted Rachel from his left shoulder to his right, patting her
gently on the back.

Het Masteen shook his head. “No, there is time. | meant
only to point out that in hopelessness there is always hope.
We have learned much from the stories so far. Yet each of us
has some seed of promise buried even deeper than we have
admitted.”

“| don’t see ...” began Father Hoyt but was interrupted by
Martin Silenus’s sudden shout.

“It’s the wagon! The fucking windwagon. Here at last!”

It was another twenty minutes before the windwagon tied up
to one of the wharves. The craft came out of the north, its
sails white squares against a dark plain draining of color.
The last light had faded by the time the large ship had
tacked close to the low bluff, folded its main sails, and rolled
to a stop.

The Consul was impressed. The thing was wooden,
handcrafted, and huge—curved in the pregnant lines of

some seagoing galleon out of Old Earth’s ancient history.
The single gigantic wheel, set in the center of the curving
hull, normally would have been invisible in the two-meter-
tall grass, but the Consul caught a glimpse of the underside
as he carried luggage onto the wharf. From the ground it
would be six or seven meters to the railing, and more than
five times that height to the tip of the mainmast. From where
he stood, panting from exertion, the Consul could hear the
Snap of pennants far above and a steady, almost subsonic
hum that would be coming from either the ship’s interior
flywheel or its massive gyroscopes.

A gangplank extruded from the upper hull and lowered
itself to the wharf. Father Hoyt and Brawne Lamia had to
step back quickly or be crushed.

The windwagon was less well lighted than the Benares;
illumination appeared to consist of several lanterns hanging
from spars. No crew had been visible during the approach of
the ship and no one came into view now.

“Hallo!” called the Consul from the base of the gangplank.
No one answered.

“Wait here a minute, please,” said Kassad and mounted
the long ramp in five strides.

The others watched While Kassad paused at the top,
touched his belt where the small deathwand was tucked,
and then disappeared amidships. Several minutes later a
light flared through broad windows at the stern, casting
trapezoids of yellow on the grass below.

“Come up,” called Kassad from the head of the ramp. “It’s
empty.”

The group struggled with their luggage, making several
trips. The Consul helped Het Masteen with the heavy Mobius
trunk and through his fingertips he could feel a faint but
intense vibration.

“So where the fuck is the crew?” asked Martin Silenus
when they were assembled on the foredeck. They had taken
their single-file tour through the narrow corridors and

cabins, down stairways more ladder than stairs, and through
cabins not much bigger than the built-in bunks they
contained. Only the rearmost cabin—the captain’s cabin, if
that is what it was—approached the size and comfort of
standard accommodations on the Benares.

“It’s obviously automated,” said Kassad. The FORCE officer
pointed to halyards which disappeared into slots in the deck,
manipulators all but invisible among the rigging and spars,
and the subtle hint of gears halfway up the lateen-rigged
rear mast.

“I didn’t see a control center,” said Lamia. “Not so much as
a diskey or C-spot nexus.” She slipped her comlog from a
breast pocket and tried to interface on standard data, comm,
and biomed frequencies. There was no response from the
ship.

“The ships used to be crewed,” said the Consul. “Temple
initiates used to accompany the pilgrims to the mountains.”

“Well, they're not here now,” said Hoyt. “But | guess we
can assume that someone is still alive at the tram station or
Keep Chronos. They sent the wagon for us.”

“Or everyone’s dead and the windwagon is running on an
automatic schedule,” said Lamia. She looked over her
shoulder as rigging and canvas creaked in a sudden gust of
wind. “Damn, it’s weird to be cut off from everybody and
everything like this. It’s like being blind and deaf. | don’t
know how colonials stand it.”

Martin Silenus approached the group and sat on the
railing. He drank from a long green bottle and said:

“Where’s the Poet? Show him! Show him,
Muses mine, that | may know him!
‘Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he king,
Or poorest of the beggar-class,
Or any other wondrous thing
A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato.

‘Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or eagle, finds his way to

All its instincts. He hath heard
The lion’s roaring, and can tell

What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the tigers yell

Comes articulate and presseth
On his ear like mother-tongue.”

“Where did you get that wine bottle?” asked Kassad.

Martin Silenus smiled. His eyes were small and bright in
the lantern glow. “The galley’s fully stocked and there’s a
bar. | declared it open.”

“We should fix some dinner,” said the Consul although all
he wanted at the moment was some wine. It had been more
than ten hours since they had last eaten.

There came a clank and whir and all six of them moved to
the starboard rail. The gangplank had drawn itself in. They
whirled again as canvas unfurled, lines grew taut, and
somewhere a flywheel hummed into the ultrasonic. Sails
filled, the deck tilted slightly, and the windwagon moved
away from the wharf and into the darkness. The only sounds
were the flap and creak of the ship, the distant, rumble of
the wheel, and the rasp of grass on the hull bottom.

The six of them watched as the shadow of the bluff fell
behind, the unlighted beacon pyre receding as a faint gleam
of starlight on pale wood, and then there were only the sky
and night and swaying circles of lantern light.

“I'll go below,” said the Consul, “and see if | can get a
meal together.”

The others stayed above awhile, feeling the slight surge
and rumble through the soles of their feet and watching
darkness pass. The Sea of Grass was visible only as the
place where stars ended and flat blackness began. Kassad
used a handbeam to illuminate glimpses of canvas and
rigging, lines being pulled tight by invisible hands, and then

he checked all the corners and shadowed places from stern
to bow. The others watched in silence. When he clicked the
light off, the darkness seemed less oppressive, the starlight
brighter. A rich, fertile smell—more of a farm in springtime
than of the sea—came to them on a breeze which had swept
across a thousand kilometers of grass.

Sometime later the Consul called to them and they went
below to eat.

The galley was cramped and there was no mess table, so
they used the large cabin in the stern as their common
room, pushing three of the trunks together as a makeshift
table. Four lanterns swinging from low beams made the
room bright. A breeze blew in when Het Masteen opened one
of the tall windows above the bed.

The Consul set plates piled high with sandwiches on the
largest trunk and returned again with thick white cups and a
coffee therm. He poured while the others ate.

“This is quite good,” said Fedmahn Kassad. “Where did
you get the roast beef?”

“The cold box is fully stocked. There’s another large
freezer in the aft pantry.”

“Electrical?” asked Het Masteen.

“No. Double insulated.”

Martin Silenus sniffed a jar, found a knife on the sandwich
plate, and added great dollops of horseradish to his
sandwich. His eyes sparkled with tears as he ate.

“How long does this crossing generally take?” Lamia asked
the Consul.

He looked up from his study of the circle of hot black
coffee in his cup. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Crossing the Sea of Grass. How long?”

“A night and a half a day to the mountains,” said the
Consul. “If the winds are with us.”

“And then ... how long to cross the mountains?” asked
Father Hoyt.

“Less than a day,” said the Consul.

“If the tramway is running,” added Kassad.

The Consul sipped the hot coffee and made a face. “We
have to assume it is. Otherwise ...”

“Otherwise what?” demanded Lamia.

“Otherwise,” said Colonel Kassad, moving to the open
window and putting his hands on his hips, “we will be
stranded six hundred klicks from the Time Tombs and a
thousand from the southern cities.”

The Consul shook his head. “No,” he said. “The Temple
priests or whoever are behind this pilgrimage have seen to it
that we’ve gotten this far. They’ll make sure we go all the
way.”

Brawne Lamia crossed her arms and frowned. “As
what ... sacrifices?”

Martin Silenus whooped a laugh and brought out his
bottle:

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.”

Brawne Lamia reached under her tunic and brought out a
cutting laser no larger than her little finger. She aimed it at
the poet’s head. “You miserable little shit. One more word
out of you and ... | swear... l'II slag you where you stand.”

The silence was suddenly absolute except for the
background rumble-groan of the ship. The Consul moved
toward Martin Silenus. Colonel Kassad took two steps behind
Lamia.

The poet took a long drink and smiled at the dark-haired
woman. His lips were moist. “Oh build your ship of death,”
he whispered. “Oh build it!”

Lamia’s fingers were white on the pencil laser. The Consul
edged closer to Silenus, not Knowing what to do, imagining
the whipping beam of light fusing his own eyes. Kassad
leaned toward Lamia like two meters of tensed shadow.

“Madam,” said Sol Weintraub from where he sat on the
bunk against the far wall, “need | remind you that there is a
child present?”

Lamia glanced to her right. Weintraub had removed a
deep drawer from a ship’s cupboard and had set it on the
bed as a cradle. He had bathed the infant and come in
silently just before the poet’s recitation. Now he set the baby
softly in the padded nest.

“I’m sorry,” said Brawne Lamia and lowered the small
laser. “It’s just that he makes me so... angry.”

Weintraub nodded, rocking the drawer slightly. The gentle
roll of the windwagon combined with the incessant rumble
of the great wheel appeared to have already put the child to
sleep. “We're all tired and tense,” said the scholar. “Perhaps
we should find our lodgings for the night and turn in.”

The woman sighed and tucked the weapon in her belt. “I
won’t sleep,” she said. “Things are too ... strange.”

Others nodded. Martin Silenus was sitting on the broad
ledge below the stern windows. Now he pulled up his legs,
took a drink, and said to Weintraub, “Tell your story, old
man.”

“Yes,” said Father Hoyt. The priest looked exhausted to the
point of being cadaverous, but his feverish eyes burned.
“Tell us. We need to have the stories told and time to think
about them before we arrive.”

Weintraub passed a hand across his bald scalp. “It’s a dull
tale,” he said. “I’ve never been to Hyperion before. There are
no confrontations with monsters, no acts of heroism. It’s a
tale by a man whose idea of epic adventure is speaking to a
class without his notes.”

“All the better,” said Martin Silenus. “We need a soporific.”

Sol Weintraub sighed, adjusted his glasses, and nodded.
There were a few streaks of dark in his beard, but most of it
had gone gray. He turned the lantern low over the baby’s
bed and moved to a chair in the center of the room.

The Consul turned down the other lamps and poured more
coffee for those who wanted it. Sol Weintraub’s voice was
slow, careful in phrase and precise in wording, and before
long the gentle cadence of his story blended with the soft
rumble and slow pitchings of the wind wagon’s progress
north.

THE SCHOLAR’S TALE:
THE RIVER LETHE’S TASTE IS BITTER

S° Weintraub and his wife Sarai had enjoyed their life
even before the birth of their daughter; Rachel made
things as close to perfect as the couple could imagine.

Sarai was twenty-seven when the child was conceived, Sol
was twenty-nine. Neither of them had considered Poulsen
treatments because neither of them could afford it, but even
without such care they looked forward to another fifty years
of health.

Both had lived their entire lives on Barnard’s World, one of
the oldest but least exciting members of the Hegemony.
Barnard’s was in the Web, but it made little difference to Sol

and Sarai since they could not afford frequent farcaster
travel and had little wish to go at any rate. Sol had recently
celebrated his tenth year With Nightenhelser College, where
he taught history and classical studies and did his own
research on ethical evolution. Nightenhelser was a small
school, fewer than three thousand students, but its
academic reputation was outstanding and it attracted young
people from all over the Web. The primary complaint of
these students was that Nightenhelser and its surrounding
community of Crawford constituted an island of civilization
in an ocean of corn. It was true; the college was three
thousand flat kilometers away from the capital of Bussard
and the terraformed land in between was given over to
farming. There had been no forests to fell, no hills to deal
with, and no mountains to break the flat monotony of
cornfields, beanfields, cornfields, wheatfields, cornfields, rice
paddies, and cornfields. The radical poet Salmud Brevy had
taught briefly at Nightenhelser before the Glennon-Height
Mutiny, had been fired, and upon farcasting to Renaissance
Vector had told his friends that Crawford County on South
Sinzer on Barnards World constituted the Eighth Circle of
Desolation on the smallest pimple on the absolute ass-end of
Creation.

Sol and Sarai Weintraub liked it. Crawford, a town of
twenty-five thousand, might have been reconstructed from
some _ nineteenth-century mid-American template. The
streets were wide and overarched with elms and oaks.
(Barnard’s had been the second extrasolar Earth colony,
centuries before the Hawking drive and Hegira, and the
seedships then had been huge.) Homes in Crawford
reflected styles ranging from early Victorian to Canadian
Revival, but they all seemed to be white and set far back on
well-trimmed lawns.

The college itself was Georgian, an assemblage of red
brick and white pillars surrounding the oval common. Sol’s
office was on the third floor of Placher Hall, the oldest

building on campus, and in the winter he could look out on
bare branches which carved the common into complex
geometries. Sol loved the chalk-dust and old-wood smell of
the place, a smell which had not changed since he was a
freshman there, and each day climbing to his office he
treasured the deeply worn grooves in the steps, a legacy of
twenty generations of Nightenhelser students.

Sarai had been born on a farm halfway between Bussard
and Crawford and had received her PhD in music theory a
year before Sol earned his doctorate. She had been a happy
and energetic young woman, making up in personality what
she lacked in accepted norms of physical beauty, and she
carried this attractiveness of person into later life. Sarai had
studied off world for two years at the University of New
Lyons on Deneb Drei, but she was homesick there: the
sunsets were abrupt, the much-vaunted mountains slicing
off the sunlight like a ragged scythe, and she longed for the
hours-long sunsets of home where Barnard’s Star hung on
the horizon like a great, tethered, red balloon while the sky
congealed to evening. She missed the perfect flatness where
—peering from her third-floor room under the steep gables—
a little girl could look fifty kilometers across tasseled fields
to watch a storm approach like a bruise-black curtain lit
within by lightning bolts. And Sarai missed her family.

She and Sol met a week after she transferred to
Nightenhelser; it was another three years before he
proposed marriage and she accepted. At first she saw
nothing in the short graduate student. She was still wearing
Web fashions then, involved in Post-Destructionist music
theories, reading Obit and Nihil and the most avant-garde
magazines from Renaissance Vector and TC2, feigning
sophisticated weariness with life and a rebel’s vocabulary—
and none of this jelled with the undersized but earnest
history major who spilled fruit cocktail on her at Dean
Moore’s honors party. Any exotic qualities which might have
come from Sol Weintraub’s Jewish legacy were instantly

negated by his BW accent, his Crawford Squire Shop
wardrobe, and the fact that he had come to the party with a
copy of Detresque’s Solitudes in Variance absentmindedly
tucked under his arm.

For Sol it was love at first sight. He stared at the laughing,
red-cheeked girl and ignored the expensive dress and
affected mandarin nails in favor of the personality which
blazed like a beacon to the lonely junior. Sol had not known
he was lonely until he met Sarai, but after the first time he
shook her hand and spilled fruit salad down the front of her
dress he knew that his life would be empty forever if they
did not marry.

They married the week after the announcement of Sol’s
teaching appointment at the college. Their honeymoon was
on Maui-Covenant, his first farcast trip abroad, and for three
weeks they rented a mobile isle and sailed alone on it
through the wonders of the Equatorial Archipelago. Sol
never forgot the images from those sundrenched and wind-
filled days, and the secret image he would always most
cherish was of Sarai rising nude from a nighttime swim, the
Core stars blazing above while her own body glowed
constellations from the phosphorescence of the island’s
wake.

They had wanted a child immediately but it was to be five
years before nature agreed.

Sol remembered cradling Sarai in his arms as she curled in
pain, a difficult delivery, until finally, incredibly, Rachel
Sarah Weintraub was born at 2:01 A.M. in Crawford County
Med Center.

The presence of an infant intruded upon Sol’s solipsistic
life as a serious academic and Sarai’s profession as music
critic for Barnard’s datasphere, but neither minded. The first
months were a blend of constant fatigue and joy. Late at
night, between feedings, Sol would tiptoe into the nursery
just to check on Rachel and to stand and gaze at the baby.
More often than not he would find Sarai already there and

the two would watch, arm in arm, at the miracle of a baby
sleeping on its stomach, rump in the air, head burrowed into
the bumper pad at the head of the crib.

Rachel was one of those rare children who managed to be
cute without becoming self-consciously precious; by the
time she was two standard years old her appearance and
personality were striking—her mother’s light brown hair, red
cheeks, and broad smile, her father’s large brown eyes.
Friends said that the child combined the best portions of
Sarai’s sensitivity and Sol’s intellect. Another friend, a child
psychologist from the college, once commented that Rachel
at age five showed the most reliable indicators of true
giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy
for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.

One day in his office, studying ancient files from Old Earth,
Sol was reading about the effect of Beatrice on the world
view of Dante Alighieri when he was struck by a passage
written by a critic from the twentieth or twenty-first century:

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the
world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark—what Melville would
call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich
Standard....

Sol paused to access the definition of Greenwich Standard,
and then he read on. The critic had added a personal note:

Most of us, | hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice,
someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and
intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.

Sol had shut off the display and gazed out at the black

geometries of branches above the common.

Rachel was not insufferably perfect. When she was five
standard, she carefully cut the hair of her five favorite dolls

and then cut her own hair shortest of all. When she was
seven, she decided that the migrant workers staying in their
run-down houses on the south end of town lacked a
nutritious diet, so she emptied the house’s pantries, cold
boxes, freezers, and synthesizer banks, talked three friends
into accompanying her, and distributed several hundred
marks’ worth of the family’s monthly food budget.

When she was ten, Rachel responded to a dare from
Stubby Berkowitz and tried to climb to the top of Crawford’s
oldest elm. She was forty meters up, less than five meters
from the top, when a branch broke and she fell two thirds of
the way to the ground. Sol was paged on his comlog while
discussing the moral implications of Earth’s first nuclear
disarmament era and he left the class without a word and
ran the twelve blocks to the Med Center.

Rachel had broken her left leg, two ribs, punctured a lung,
and fractured her jaw. She was floating in a bath of recovery
nutrient when Sol burst in, but she managed to look over
her mother’s shoulder, smile slightly, and say through the
wire cast on her jaw: “Dad, | was fifteen feet from the top.
Maybe closer. l'II make it next time.”

Rachel graduated with honors from secondary tutorials
and received scholarship offers from corporate academies on
five worlds and three universities, including Harvard on New
Earth. She chose Nightenhelser.

It was little surprise to Sol that his daughter chose
archaeology as a major. One of his fondest memories of her
was the long afternoons she had spent under the front porch
when she was about two, digging in the loam, ignoring
spiders and googlepeds, rushing into the house to show off
every plastic plate and tarnished pfennig she had
excavated, demanding to know where it had come from,
what were the people like who had left it there?

Rachel received her undergraduate degree when she was
nineteen standard, worked that summer on her
grandmother's farm, and far-cast away the next fall. She was
at Reichs University on Freeholm for twenty-eight local
months, and when she returned it was as if color had flowed
back into Sol and Sarai’s world.

For two weeks their daughter—an adult now, self-aware
and secure in some ways that grown-ups twice her age often
failed to be—rested and reveled in being home. One
evening, walking across the campus just after sunset, she
pressed her father on details of his heritage. “Dad, do you
still consider yourself a Jew?”

Sol had run his hand over his thinning hair, surprised by
the question. “A Jew? Yes, | suppose so. It doesn’t mean what
it once did, though.”

“Am | a Jew?” asked Rachel. Her cheeks glowed in the
fragile light.

“If you want to be,” said Sol. “It doesn’t have the same
significance with Old Earth gone.”

“If I'd been a boy, would you have had me circumcised?”

Sol had laughed, delighted and embarrassed by the
question.

“I’m serious,” said Rachel.

Sol adjusted his glasses. “I guess | would have, kiddo. |
never thought about it.”

“Have you been to the synagogue in Bussard?”

“Not since my bar mitzvah,” said Sol, thinking back to the
day fifty years earlier when his father had borrowed Uncle
Richard’s Vikken and had flown the family to the capital for
the ritual.

“Dad, why do Jews feel that things are ... less important
now than before the Hegira?”

Sol spread his hands—strong hands, more those of a
stoneworker than an academic. “That’s a good question,
Rachel. Probably because so much of the dream is dead.
Israel is gone. The New Temple lasted less time than the first

"m

and second. God broke His word by destroying the Earth a
second time in the way He did. And this Diaspora
is ... forever.”

“But Jews maintain their ethnic and religious identity in
some places,” his daughter insisted.

“Oh, sure. On Hebron and isolated areas of the Concourse
you can find entire communities ... Hasidic, Orthodox,
Hasmonean, you name it ... but they tend to be ... nonvital,
picturesque ... tourist-oriented.”

“Like a theme park?”

“Yes.”

“Could you take me to Temple Beth-el tomorrow? | can
borrow Khaki’s strat.”

“No need,” said Sol. “We'll use the college’s shuttle.” He
paused. “Yes,” he said at last, “I would like to take you to the
synagogue tomorrow.”

It was getting dark under the old elms. Streetlights came
on up and down the wide lane which led to their home.

“Dad,” said Rachel, “I’m going to ask you a question I’ve
asked about a million times since | was two. Do you believe
in God?”

Sol had not smiled. He had no choice but to give her the
answer he had given her a million times. “I’m waiting to,” he
said.

Rachel’s postgraduate work dealt with alien and pre-
Hegira artifacts. For three standard years Sol and Sarai
would receive occasional visits followed by fatline flimsies
from exotic worlds near but not within the Web. They all
knew that her field work in quest of dissertation would soon
take her beyond the Web, into the Outback where time-debt
ate away at the lives and memorie’s of those left behind.

“Where the hell is Hyperion?” Sarai had asked during
Rachel’s last vacation before the expedition left. “It sounds
like a brand name for some new household product.”

“It’s a great place, Mom. There are more nonhuman
artifacts there than any place except Armaghast.”

“Then why not go to Armaghast?” said Sarai. “Its only a
few months from the Web. Why settle for second best?”

“Hyperion hasn’t become the big tourist attraction yet,”
Said Rachel. “Although they’re beginning to become a
problem. People with money are more willing to travel
outside the Web now.”

Sol had found his voice suddenly husky. “Will you be going
to the labyrinth or the artifacts called the Time Tombs?”

“The Time Tombs, Dad. lIl be working with Dr. Melio
Arundez and he knows more about the Tombs than anyone
alive.”

“Aren’t they dangerous?” asked Sol, framing the question
as casually as he could but hearing the edge in his voice.

Rachel smiled. “Because of the Shrike legend? No.
Nobody’s been bothered by that particular legend for two
standard centuries.”

“But I’ve seen documents about the trouble there during
the second colonization ...” began Sol.

“Me too, Dad. But they didn’t know about the big rock eels
that came down into the desert to hunt. They probably lost a
few people to those things and panicked. You know how
legends begin. Besides, the rock eels have been hunted to
extinction.”

“Spacecraft don’t land there,” persisted Sol. “You have to
Sail to the Tombs. Or hike. Or some damn thing.”

Rachel laughed. “In the early days, people flying in
underestimated the effects of the anti-entropic fields and
there were some accidents. But there’s dirigible service now.
They have a big hotel called Keep Chronos at the north edge
of the mountains where hundreds of tourists a year stay.”

“Will you be staying there?” asked Sarai.

“Part of the time. It’ll be exciting, Mom.”

“Not too exciting, | hope,” said Sarai and all of them had
smiled.

During the four years that Rachel was in transit—a few
weeks of cryogenic fugue for her—Sol found that he missed
his daughter much more than if she had been out of touch
but busy somewhere in the Web. The thought that she was
flying away from him faster than the speed of light, wrapped
in the artificial quantum cocoon of the Hawking effect,
seemed unnatural and ominous to him.

They kept busy. Sarai retired from the critic business to
devote more time to local environmental issues, but for Sol it
was one of the most hectic times of his life. His second and
third books came out and the second one— Moral Turning
Points—caused such a stir that he was in constant demand
at off world conferences and symposia. He traveled to a few
alone, to a few more with Sarai, but although both of them
enjoyed the idea of traveling, the actual experience of
facing strange foods, different gravities, and the light from
strange suns all paled after a while and Sol found himself
spending more time at home researching his next book,
attending conferences, if he had to, via interactive holo from
the college.

It was almost five years after Rachel left on her expedition
that Sol had a dream which would change his life.

Sol dreamed that he was wandering through a great
structure with columns the size of small redwood trees and a
ceiling lost to sight far above him, through which red light
fell in solid shafts. At times he caught glimpses of things far
off in the gloom to his left or right: once he made out a pair
of stone legs rising like massive buildings through the
darkness; another time he spied what appeared to be a
crystal scarab rotating far above him, its insides ablaze with
cool lights.

Finally Sol stopped to rest. Far behind him he could hear
what sounded like a great conflagration, entire cities and

forests burning. Ahead of him glowed the lights he had been
walking toward, two ovals of deepest red.

He was mopping sweat from his brow when an immense
voice said to him:

“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and
go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at
one of the places of which | shall tell you.”

And in his dream Sol had stood and said, “You can’t be
serious.” And he had walked on through darkness, the red
orbs glowing now like bloody moons hanging above an
indistinct plain, and when he stopped to rest the immense
voice said:

“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and
go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at
one of the places of which | shall tell you.”

And Sol had shrugged off the weight of the voice and had
said distinctly into the darkness, “I heard you the first
time ... the answer is still no.”

Sol knew he was dreaming then, and part of his mind
enjoyed the irony of the script, but another part wanted only
to waken. Instead, he found himself on a low balcony looking
down on a room where Rachel lay naked on a broad block of
stone. The scene was illuminated by the glow of the twin red
orbs. Sol looked down at his right hand and found a long,
curved knife there. The blade and handle appeared to be
made of bone.

The voice, sounding more than ever to Sol like some cut-
rate holie director’s shallow idea of what God’s voice should
sound like, came again:

“Sol! You must listen well. The future of humankind depends upon your
obedience in this matter. You must take your daughter, your daughter

Rachel whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her
there as a burnt offering at one of the places of which I shall tell you.”

And Sol, sick of the whole dream yet somehow alarmed by it,

had turned and thrown the knife far into the darkness. When

he turned back to find his daughter, the scene had faded.

The red orbs hung closer than ever, and now Sol could see

that they were multifaceted gems the size of small worlds.
The amplified voice came again:

“So? You have had your chance, Sol Weintraub. If you change your
mind, you know where to find me.”

And Sol awakened half laughing, half chilled by the dream.
Amused by the thought that the entire Talmud and the Old
Testament might be nothing more than a cosmic shaggy-dog
story.

About the time Sol was having his dream, Rachel was on
Hyperion finishing her first year of research there. The team
of nine archaeologists and six physicists had found Keep
Chronos fascinating but far too crowded with tourists and
would-be Shrike pilgrims, so after the first month spent
commuting from the hotel, they had set up a permanent
camp between the ruined city and the small canyon holding
the Time Tombs.

While half the team excavated the more recent site of the
unfinished city, two of Rachel’s colleagues helped her
catalogue every aspect of the Tombs. The physicists were
fascinated with the anti-entropic fields and spent much of
their time setting small flags of different colors to mark the
limits of the so-called time tides.

Rachel’s team concentrated their work in the structure
called the Sphinx, although the creature represented in
stone was neither human nor lion; it may not have been a

creature at all, although the smooth lines atop the stone
monolith suggested curves of a living thing, and the
sweeping appendages made everyone think of wings. Unlike
the other Tombs, which lay open and were easily inspected,
the Sphinx was a mass of heavy blocks honeycombed with
narrow corridors, some of which tightened to impossibility,
some of which widened to auditorium-sized proportions, but
none of which led anywhere but back on themselves. There
were no crypts, treasure rooms, plundered sarcophogi, wall
murals, or secret passages, merely a maze of senseless
corridors through sweating stone.

Rachel and her lover, Melio Arundez, began mapping the
Sphinx, using a method which had been in use for at least
seven hundred years, having been pioneered in the
Egyptian pyramids sometime in the twentieth century.
Arranging sensitive radiation and cosmic ray detectors at
the lowest point in the Sphinx, they recorded arrival times
and deflection patterns of the particles passing through the
mass of stone above them, watching for hidden rooms or
passages which would not show up even on deep imaging
radar. Because of the busy tourist season and the concern of
the Hyperion Home Rule Council that the Tombs might be
damaged by such research, Rachel and Melio went out to
their site every night at midnight, making the half-hour walk
and crawl through the corridor maze which they had rigged
with blue glow-globes. There, sitting under hundreds of
thousands of tons of stone, they would watch their
instruments until morning, listening to their earphones ping
with the sound of particles born in the belly of dying stars.

The time tides had not been a problem with the Sphinx. Of
all the Tombs, it seemed the least protected by the anti-
entropic fields and the physicists had carefully mapped the
times when the tide surges might pose a threat. High tide
was at 1000 hours, receding only twenty minutes later back
toward the Jade Tomb half a kilometer to the south. Tourists
were not allowed near the Sphinx until after 1200 hours, and

to leave a margin of safety, the site made sure they were out
by 0900. The physics team had planted chronotropic sensors
at various points along the paths and walkways between the
Tombs, both to alert the monitors to variations of the tides
and to warn the visitors.

With only three weeks to go of her year of research on
Hyperion, Rachel awoke one night, left her sleeping lover,
and took a ground effect jeep from the camp to the Tombs.
She and Melio had decided that it was foolish for both of
them to monitor the equipment every night; now they
alternated, one working at the site while the other collated
data and prepared for the final project—a radar mapping of
the dunes between the Jade Tomb and the Obelisk.

The night was cool and beautiful. A profusion of stars
stretched from horizon to horizon, four or five times the
number Rachel had grown up looking at from Barnard’s
World. The low dunes whispered and shifted in the strong
breeze blowing from the mountains in the south.

Rachel found lights still burning at the site. The physics
team was just calling it a day and loading their own jeep.
She chatted with them, had a cup of coffee as they drove
away, and then took her backpack and made the twenty-
five-minute trip into the basement of the Sphinx.

For the hundredth time Rachel wondered who had built
the Tombs and for what purpose. Dating of the construction
materials had been useless because of the effect of the anti-
entropic field. Only analysis of the Tombs in relation to the
erosion of the canyon and other surrounding geological
features had suggested an age of at least half a million
years. The feeling was that the architects of the Time Tombs
had been humanoid, even though nothing but the gross
scale of the structures suggested such a thing. Certainly the
passageways in the Sphinx revealed little: some were
human enough in size and shape, but then meters farther
along the same corridor might dwindle to a tube the size of a
sewfer pipe and then transform itself into something larger

and more random than a natural cavern. Doorways, if they
could be called such since they opened to nothing in
particular, might be triangular or trapezoidal or ten-sided as
commonly as rectangular.

Rachel crawled the last twenty meters down a steep slope,
Sliding her backpack ahead of her. The heatless glow-globes
gave the rock and her flesh a bluish, bloodless cast. The
“basement,” when she reached it, seemed a haven of human
clutter and smells. Several folding chairs filled the center of
the small space while detectors, oscilloscopes, and other
paraphernalia lined the narrow table against the north wall.
A plank on sawhorses along the opposite wall held coffee
cups, a chess set, a half-eaten doughnut, two paperbacks,
and a plastic toy of some sort of dog in a grass skirt.

Rachel settled in, set her coffee therm next to the toy, and
checked the cosmic ray detectors. The data appeared to be
the same: no hidden rooms or passages, just a few niches
even the deep radar had missed. In the morning Melio and
Stefan would set a deep probe working, getting an imager
filament in and sampling the air before digging further with
a micro-manipulator. So far a dozen such niches had turned
up nothing of interest. The joke at camp was that the next
hole, no bigger than a fist, would reveal miniature
sarcophagi, undersized urns, a petite mummy, or—as Melio
put it—“a teeny-tiny Tutankhamten.”

Out of habit, Rachel tried the comm links on her comlog.
Nothing. Forty meters of stone tended to do that. They had
talked of stringing telephone wire from the basement to the
surface, but there had been no pressing need and now their
time was almost up. Rachel adjusted the input channels on
her comlog to monitor the detector data and then settled
back for a long, boring night.

There was the wonderful story of the Old Earth pharaoh—
was it Cheops?—who authorized his huge pyramid, agreed
to the burial chamber being deep under the center of the
thing, and then lay awake nights for years in a

claustrophobic panic, thinking of all those tons of stone
above him for all eternity. Eventually the pharaoh ordered
the burial chamber repositioned two thirds the way up the
great pyramid. Most unorthodox. Rachel could understand
the king’s position. She hoped that—wherever he was—he
slept better now.

Rachel was almost dozing herself when—at 0215—her
comlog chirped, the detectors screamed, and she jumped to
her feet. According to the sensors, the Sphinx had suddenly
grown a dozen new chambers, some larger than the total
structure. Rachel keyed displays and the air misted with
models that changed as she watched. Corridor schematics
twisted back on themselves like rotating Mobius strips. The
external sensors indicated the upper structure twisting and
bending like polyflex in the wind—or like wings.

Rachel knew that it was some type of multiple
malfunction, but even as she tried to recalibrate she called
data and impressions into her comlog. Then several things
happened at once.

She heard the drag of feet in the corridor above her.

All of the displays went dead simultaneously.

Somewhere in the maze of corridors a time-tide alarm
began to blare.

All of the lights went off.

This final event made no sense. The instrument packages
held their own power supplies and would have stayed
lighted through a nuclear attack. The lamp they used in the
basement had a new ten-year power cell. The glow-globes in
the corridors were bioluminescent and needed no power.

Nonetheless, the lights were out. Rachel pulled a flashlight
laser out of the knee pocket of her jumpsuit and triggered it.
Nothing happened.

For the first time in her life, terror closed on Rachel
Weintraub like a hand on her heart. She could not breathe.
For ten seconds she willed herself to be absolutely still, not
even listening, merely waiting for the panic to recede. When

it had subsided enough for her to breathe without gasping,
she felt her way to the instruments and keyed them. They
did not respond. She lifted her comlog and thumbed the
diskey. Nothing ... which was impossible, of course, given
the solid-state invulnerability and power-cell reliability of
the thing. Still, nothing.

Rachel could hear her pulse pounding now but she again
fought back the panic and began feeling her way toward the
only exit. The thought of finding her way through the maze
in absolute darkness made her want to scream but she could
think of no other alternatives.

Wait. There had been old lights throughout the Sphinx
maze but the research team had strung the glow-globes.
Strung them. There was a perlon line connecting them all
the way to the surface.

Fine. Rachel groped her way toward the exit, feeling the
cold stone under her fingers. Was it this cold before?

There came the clear sound of something sharp scraping
its way down the access shaft.

“Melio?” called Rachel into the blackness. “Tanya? Kurt?”

The scraping sounded very close. Rachel backed away,
Knocking over an instrument and chair in the blackness.
Something touched her hair and she gasped, raised her
hand.

The ceiling was lower. The solid block of stone, five meters
square, slid lower even as she raised her other hand to touch
it. The opening to the corridor was halfway up the wall.
Rachel staggered toward it, swinging her hands in front of
her like a blind person. She tripped over a folding chair,
found the instrument table, followed it to the far wall, felt
the bottom of the corridor shaft disappearing as the ceiling
came lower. She pulled back her fingers a second before
they were sliced off.

Rachel sat down in the darkness. An oscilloscope scraped
against the ceiling until the table cracked and collapsed
under it. Rachel moved her head in short, desperate arcs.

There was a metallic raso—almost a breathing sound—less
than a meter from her. She began to back away, sliding
across a floor suddenly filled with broken equipment. The
breathing grew louder.
Something sharp and infinitely cold grasped her wrist.
Rachel screamed at last.

La e ka

There was no fatline transmitter on Hyperion in those
days. Nor did the spinship HS Farraux City have FTL-comm
capability. So the first Sol and Sarai heard of their
daughter’s accident was when the Hegemony consulate on
Parvati fatlined the college that Rachel had been injured,
that she was stable but unconscious, and that she was being
transferred from Parvati to the Web world of Renaissance
Vector via medical torchship. The trip would take a little over
ten days’ shiptime with a five-month time-debt. Those five
months were agony for Sol and his wife, and by the time the
medical ship put in at the Renaissance farcaster nexus, they
had imagined the worst a thousand times. It had been eight
years since they had last seen Rachel.

The Med Center in Da Vinci was a floating tower sustained
by direct broadcast power. The view over the Como Sea was
breathtaking but neither Sol nor Sarai had time for it as they
went from level to level in search of their daughter. Dr. Singh
and Melio Arundez met them in the hub of Intensive Care.
Introductions were rushed.

“Rachel?” asked Sarai.

“Asleep,” said Dr. Singh. She was a tall woman, aristocratic
but with kind eyes. “As far as we can tell, Rachel has
suffered no physical ... ah ... injury. But she has been
unconscious now for some seventeen standard weeks, her
time. Only in the past ten days have her brain waves
registered deep sleep rather than coma.”

“| don’t understand,” said Sol. “Was there an accident at
the site? A concussion?”

“Something happened,” said Melio Arundez, “but we’re
not sure what. Rachel was in one of the
artifacts ... alone ... her comlog and other instruments
recorded nothing out of the ordinary. But there was a surge
in a phenomenon there known as anti-entropic fields ...”

“The time tides,” said Sol. “We know about them. Go on.”

Arundez nodded and opened his hands as if molding air.
“There was a... field surge ... more like a tsunami than a
tide ... the Sphinx ... the artifact Rachel was in ... was totally
inundated. | mean, there was no physical damage but
Rachel was unconscious when we found her ...”He turned to
Dr. Singh for help.

“Your daughter was in a coma,” said the doctor. “It was not
possible to put her into cryogenic fugue in that condition....”

“So she came through quantum leap without fugue?”
demanded Sol. He had read about the psychological damage
to travelers who had experienced the Hawking effect
directly.

“No, no,” soothed Singh. “She was unconscious in a way
which shielded her quite as well as fugue state.”

“Is she hurt?” demanded Sarai.

“We don’t know,” said Singh. “All life signs have returned
to near normal. Brain-wave activity is nearing a conscious
state. The problem is that her body appears to have
absorbed ... that is, the anti-entropic field appears to have
contaminated her.”

Sol rubbed his forehead. “Like radiation sickness?”

Dr. Singh hesitated. “Not precisely ... ah ... this case is
quite unprecedented. Specialists in aging diseases are due
in this afternoon from Tau Ceti Center, Lusus, and Metaxas.”

Sol met the woman’s gaze. “Doctor, are you saying that
Rachel contracted some aging disease on Hyperion?” He
paused a second to search his memory. “Something like
Methuselah syndrome or early Alzheimer’s disease?”

“No,” said Singh, “in fact your daughter’s illness has no
name. The medics here are calling it Merlin’s sickness. You

see ... your daughter is aging at a normal rate ... but as far
as we can tell, she is aging backward.”

Sarai pulled away from the group and stared at Singh as if
the doctor were insane. “I want to see my daughter,” she
said, quietly but very firmly. “I want to see Rachel now.”

Rachel awakened less than forty hours after Sol and Sarai
arrived. Within minutes she was sitting up in bed, talking
even while the medics and technicians bustled around her.
“Mom!Dad! What are you doing here?” Before either could
answer, she looked around her and blinked. “Wait a minute,
where's here? Are we in Keats?”

Her mother took her hand. “We're in a hospital in DaVinci,
dear. On Renaissance Vector.”

Rachel’s eyes widened almost comically. “Renaissance.
We're in the Web?” She looked around her in total
bewilderment.

“Rachel, what is the last thing you remember?” asked Dr.
Singh.

The young woman looked uncomprehendingly at the
medic. “The last thing | ... | remember going to sleep next to
Melio after ...” She glanced at her parents and touched her
cheeks with the tips of her fingers. “Melio? The others? Are
they ...”

“Everyone on the expedition is all right,” soothed Dr.
Singh. “You had a slight accident. About seventeen weeks
have passed. You’re back in the Web. Safe. Everyone in your
party is all right.”

“Seventeen weeks ...” Under the fading remnant of her
tan, Rachel went very pale.

Sol took her hand. “How do you feel, kiddo?” The return
pressure on his fingers was heartbreakingly weak.

“I don’t know, Daddy,” she managed. “Tired. Dizzy.
Confused.”

Sarai sat on the bed and put her arms around her. “It’s all
right, baby. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Melio entered the room, unshaven, his hair rumpled from
the nap he had been taking in the outer lounge. “Rache?”

Rachel looked at him from the safety of her mother’s arm.
“Hi,” she said, almost shyly. “I’m back.”

Sol’s opinion had been and continued to be that medicine
hadn’t really changed much since the days of leeches and
poultices; nowadays they whirred one in centrifuges,
realigned the body’s magnetic field, bombarded the victim
with sonic waves, tapped into the cells to interrogate the
RNA, and then admitted their ignorance without actually
coming out and saying so. The only thing that had changed
was that the bills were bigger.

He was dozing in a chair when Rachel’s voice awoke him.

“Daddy?”

He sat up, reached for her hand. “Here, kiddo.”

“Where am I, Dad? What’s happened?”

“You're in a hospital on Renaissance, baby. There was an
accident on Hyperion. You're all right now except it’s
affecting your memory a bit.”

Rachel clung to his hand. “A hospital? In the Web? How'd |
get here? How long have | been here?”

“About five weeks,” whispered Sol. “What’s the last thing
you remember, Rachel?”

She sat back on her pillows and touched her forehead,
feeling the tiny sensors there. “Melio and | had been at the
meeting. Talking with the team about setting up the search
equipment in the Sphinx. Oh ... Dad ... | haven’t told you
about Melio ... he’s...”

“Yes,” said Sol and handed Rachel her comlog. “Here,
kiddo. Listen to this.” He left the room.

Rachel touched the diskey and blinked as her own voice
began talking to her. “OK, Rache, you just woke up. You’re

confused. You don’t know how you got here. Well,
something’s happened to you, kid. Listen up.

“I’m recording this on the twelfth day of Tenmonth, year
457 of the Hegira, A.D. 2739 old reckoning. Yes, | know that’s
half a standard year from the last thing you remember.
Listen.

“Something happened in the Sphinx. You got caught up in
the time tide. It changed you. You’re aging backward, as
dumb as that sounds. Your body’s getting younger every
minute, although that’s not the important part right now.
When you sleep ... when we sleep ... you forget. You lose
another day from your memory before the accident, and you
lose everything since. Don’t ask me why. The doctors don’t
know. The experts don’t know. If you want an analogy, just
think of a tapeworm virus ... one of the old kind ... that’s
chewing up the data in your comlog ... backward from the
last entry.

“They don’t know why the memory loss hits you when you
sleep, either. They tried stay-awakes, but after about thirty
hours you just go catatonic for a while and the virus does its
thing anyway. So what the hell.

“You know something? This talking about yourself In the
third person is sort of therapeutic. Actually, I’m lying here
waiting for them to take me up to imaging, Knowing l'II fall
asleep when | get back ... knowing l'Il forget everything
again ... and it scares the shit out of me.

“OK, key the diskey for short-term and you get a prepared
spiel here that should catch you up on everything since the
accident. Oh ... Mom and Dad are both here and they know
about Melio. But | don’t know as much as | used to. When did
we first make love with him, mmm? The second month on
Hyperion? Then we have just a few weeks left, Rachel, and
then we'll be just acquaintances. Enjoy your memories while
you can, girl.

“This is yesterday’s Rachel, signing off.”

Sol came in to find his daughter sitting upright in the bed,
still grasping the comlog tightly, her face pale and terrified.
“Daddy ...”

He went to sit next to her and let her cry ... for the
twentieth night in a row.

Eight standard weeks after she arrived on Renaissance, Sol
and Sarai waved goodbye to Rachel and Melio at the Da
Vinci farcaster multiport and then farcast home to Barnard’s
World.

“| don’t think she should have left the hospital,” muttered
Sarai as they took the evening shuttle to Crawford. The
continent was a patchwork of harvest-ready right angles
below them.

“Mother,” said Sol, touching her knee, “the doctors would
have kept her there forever. But they’re doing it for their
own curiosity now. They’ve done everything they can to help
her ... nothing. She has a life to live.”

“But why go away with ... with him?” said Sarai. “She
barely knows him.”

Sol sighed and leaned back against the cushions of his
seat. “In two weeks she won’t remember him at all,” he said.
“At least in the way they share now. Look at it from her
position, Mother. Fighting every day to reorient herself in a
world gone mad. She’s twenty-five years old and in love. Let
her be happy.”

Sarai turned her face to the window and together, not
speaking, they watched the red sun hang like a tethered
balloon on the edge of evening.

Ld Ld *

Sol was well into the second semester when Rachel called.
It was a one-way message via farcaster cable from Freeholm
and her image hung in the center of the old holopit like a
familiar ghost.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Sorry | haven’t written or called the
past few weeks. | guess you know that I’ve left the
university. And Melio. It was dumb to try to take new
graduate-level stuff. I'd just forget Tuesday whatever was
discussed Monday. Even with disks and comlog prompts it
was a losing battle. | may enroll in the undergraduate
program again ... | remember all of it! Just kidding.

“It was just too hard with Melio, too. Or so my notes tell
me. It wasn’t his fault, I’m sure of that. He was gentle and
patient and loving to the end. It’s just that ... well, you can’t
start from scratch on a relationship every day. Our
apartment was filled with photos of us, notes | wrote to
myself about us, holos of us on Hyperion, but ... you know. In
the morning he would be an absolute stranger. By afternoon
| began to believe what we’d had, even if | couldn’t
remember. By evening I'd be crying in his arms ... then,
sooner or later, I’d go to sleep. It’s better this way.”

Rachel’s image paused, turned as if she was going to
break contact, and then steadied. She smiled at them. “So
anyway, I’ve left school for a while. The Freeholm Med
Center wants me full time but they’d have to get in line... |
got an offer from the Tau Ceti Research Institute that’s hard
to turn down. They offer a... | think they call it a ‘research
honorarium’ ... that’s bigger than what we paid for four
years at Nightenhelser and all of Reichs combined.

“I turned them down. I’m still going in as an outpatient,
but the RNA transplant series just leaves me with bruises
and a depressed feeling. Of course, | could just be depressed
because every morning | can’t remember where the bruises
came from. Ha-ha.

“Anyway, l'Il be staying with Tanya for a while and then
maybe ... | thought maybe I’d come home for a while.
Secondmonth’s my birthday ... I'll be twenty-two again.
Weird, huh? At any rate, it’s a lot easier being Wound people
| know and | met Tanya just after | transferred here when |
was twenty-two ... | think you understand.

“So... is my old room still there, Mom, or have you turned
it into a mah-jongg parlor like you’ve always threatened? So
write or give me a call. Next time l'Il shell out the money for
two-way so we Can really talk. | just ... | guess | thought ...”

Rachel waved. “Gottago. See you later, alligators. | love
you both.”

Sol flew to Bussard City the week before Rachels birthday
to pick her up at the world’s only public farcaster terminex.
He saw her first, standing with her luggage near the floral
clock. She looked young but not noticeably younger than
when they had waved goodbye on Renaissance Vector. No,
Sol realized, there was something less confident about her
posture. He shook his head to rid himself of such thoughts,
called to her, and ran to hug her.

The look of shock on her face when he released her was so
profound that he could not ignore it. “What is it, sweetie?
Whats wrong?”

It was one of the few times he had ever seen his daughter
totally at a loss for words.

“L... you ... | forgot,” she stammered. She shook her head
in a familiar way and managed to laugh and cry at the same
instant. “You look a little different is all, Dad. | remember
leaving here like it was ... literally ... yesterday. When |
saw ... your hair ...” Rachel covered her mouth.

Sol ran his hand across his scalp. “Ah, yes,” he said,
suddenly close to laughing and crying himself. “With your
school and travels, it’s been more than eleven years. I’m old.
And bald.” He opened his arms again. “Welcome back, little
one.”

Rachel moved into the protective circle of his embrace.

For several months things went well. Rachel felt more
secure with familiar things around, and for Sarai the

heartbreak of their daughter’s illness was temporarily offset
by the pleasure of having her home again.

Rachel rose early every morning and viewed her private
“orientation show” which, Sol knew, contained images of
him and Sarai a dozen years older than she remembered. He
tried to imagine what it was like for Rachel: she awoke in her
own bed, memory fresh, twenty-two years old, home on
vacation before going off world to graduate school, only to
find her parents suddenly aged, a hundred small changes in
the house and town, the news different ... years of history
having passed her by.

Sol could not imagine it.

Their first mistake was acceding to Rachel’s wishes in
inviting her old friends to her twenty-second birthday party:
the same crew who had celebrated the first time—
irrepressible Niki, Don Stewart and his friend Howard, Kathi
Obeg and Marta Tyn, her best friend Linna McKyler—all of
them then just out of college, shucking off cocoons of
childhood for new lives.

Rachel had seen them all since her return. But she had
slept ... and forgotten. And Sol and Sarai this one time did
not remember that she had forgotten.

Niki was thirty-four standard, with two children of her own
—still energetic, still irrepressible, but ancient by Rachels
standards. Don and Howard talked about their investments,
their children’s sports accomplishments, and their upcoming
vacations. Kathi was confused, speaking only twice to
Rachel and then as if she was speaking to an impostor.
Marta was openly jealous of Rachel’s youth. Linna, who had
become an ardent Zen Gnostic in the years between, cried
and left early.

When they had gone, Rachel sat in the postparty ruin of
the living room and stared at the half-eaten cake. She did

not cry. Before going upstairs she hugged her mother and
whispered to her father, “Dad, please don’t let me do
anything like that again.”

Then she went upstairs to sleep.

It was that spring when Sol again had the dream. He was
lost in a great, dark place, lighted only by two red orbs. It
was not absurd when the flat voice said:

“Sol. Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and
go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at
one of the places of which I shall tell you.”

And Sol had screamed into the darkness:

“You already have her, you son of a bitch! What do | have
to do to get her back? Tell me! Tell me, goddamn you!”

And Sol Weintraub woke sweating with tears in his eyes
and anger in his heart. In the other room he could feel his
daughter sleeping while the great worm devoured her.

In the months which followed Sol became obsessive about
obtaining information on Hyperion, the Time Tombs, and the
Shrike. As a trained researcher, he was astounded that there
were so little hard data on so provocative a topic. There was
the Church of the Shrike, of course—there were no temples
on Barnard’s World but many in the Web—but he soon found
that seeking hard information in Shrike cult literature was
like trying to map the geography of Sarnath by visiting a
Buddhist monastery. Time was mentioned in Shrike Church
dogma, but only in the sense that the Shrike was supposed
to be “... the Angel of Retribution from Beyond Time” and
that true time had ended for the human race when Old Earth
died and that the four centuries since had been “false time.”
Sol found their tracts the usual combination of double talk
and navel lint-gathering common to most religions. Still, he

planned to visit a Shrike Church temple as soon as he had
explored more serious avenues of research.

Melio Arundez launched another Hyperion expedition, also
sponsored by Reichs University, this one with the stated goal
of isolating and understanding the time-tide phenomenon
which had inflicted the Merlin sickness on Rachel. A major
development was the Hegemony Protectorate’s decision to
send along on that expedition a farcaster transmitter for
installation at the Hegemony consulate in Keats. Even so, it
would be more than three years’ Web time before the
expedition arrived on Hyperion. Sol’s first instinct was to go
with Arundez and his team—certainly any holodrama would
have the primary characters returning to the scene of the
action. But Sol overrode the instinctive urge within minutes.
He was a historian and philosopher; any contribution he
might make to the expedition’s success would be minute, at
best. Rachel still retained the interest and skills of a well-
trained undergraduate archaeologist-to-be, but those skills
dwindled a bit each day and Sol could see no benefit to her
returning to the site of the accident. Each day would be a
shock to her, awakening on a strange world, on a mission
which would require skills unknown to her. Sarai would not
allow such a thing.

Sol set aside the book he was working on—an analysis of
Kierkegaard’s theories of ethics as compromise morality as
applied to the legal machinery of the Hegemony—and
concentrated on collecting arcane data on time, on
Hyperion, and on the story of Abraham.

Months spent carrying on business as usual and collecting
information did little to satisfy his need for action.
Occasionally he vented his frustration on the medical and
scientific specialists who came to examine Rachel like
streams of pilgrims to a holy shrine.

“How the hell can this be happening!” he screamed at one
little specialist who had made the mistake of being both

smug and condescending to the patient’s father. The doctor
had a head so hairless, his face looked like lines painted on a
billiard ball. “She’s begun growing smaller!” Sol shouted,
literally buttonholing the retreating expert. “Not so one can
see, but bone mass is decreasing. How can she even begin
to become a child again? What the he// does that do to the
law of conservation of mass?”

The expert had moved his mouth but had been too rattled
to speak. His bearded colleague answered for him. “M.
Weintraub,” he said, “sir. You have to understand that your
daughter is currently inhabiting ... ah ... think of it as a
localized region of reversed entropy.”

Sol wheeled on the other man. “Are you saying that she is
merely stuck in a bubble of backwardness?”

“Ah ... no,” said the colleague, massaging his chin
nervously. “Perhaps a better analogy is that ... biologically at
least the life/metabolism mechanism has been

reversed ... ah...”

“Nonsense,” snapped Sol. “She doesn’t excrete for
nutrition or regurgitate her food. And what about all the
neurological activity? Reverse the electrochemical impulses
and you get nonsense. Her brain works, gentlemen ... it’s
her memory that is disappearing. Why, gentlemen? Why?”

The specialist finally found his voice. “We don’t know why,
M. Weintraub. Mathematically, your daughters body
resembles a time-reversed equation ... or perhaps an object
which has passed through a rapidly spinning black hole. We
don’t know how this has happened or why the physically
impossible is occurring in this instance, M. Weintraub. We
just don’t know enough.”

Sol shook each man’s hand. “Fine. That’s all | wanted to
know, gentlemen. Have a good trip back.”

On Rachel's twenty-first birthday she came to Sol’s door
an hour after they had all turned in. “Daddy?”

“What is it, kiddo?” Sol pulled on his robe and joined her
in the doorway. “Can't sleep?”

“I haven't slept for two days,” she whispered. “Been taking
stay-awakes so | can get through all of the briefing stuff | left
in the Wanta Know? file.”

Sol nodded.

“Daddy, would you come downstairs and have a drink with
me? I’ve got some things | want to talk about.”

Sol got his glasses from the nightstand and joined her
downstairs.

It proved to be the first and only time that Sol would get
drunk with his daughter. It was not a boisterous drunk—for a
while they chatted, then began telling jokes and making
puns, until each was giggling too hard to continue. Rachel
started to tell another story, sipped her drink just at the
funniest part, and almost snorted whiskey out her nose, she
was laughing so hard. Each of them thought it was the
funniest thing that had ever happened.

“I'll get another bottle,” said Sol when the tears had
ceased. “Dean Moore gave me some Scotch last
Christmas ... | think.”

When he returned, walking carefully, Rachel had sat up on
the couch and brushed her hair back with her fingers. He
poured her a small amount and the two drank in silence for a
while.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“I went through the whole thing. Saw myself, listened to
myself, saw the holos of Linna and the others all middle-
aged ...”

“Hardly middle-aged,” said Sol. “Linna will be thirty-five
next month ...”

“Well, old, you know what | mean. Anyway, | read the
medical briefs, saw the photos from Hyperion, and you know
what?”

“What?”

“| don’t believe any of it, Dad.”

Sol put down his drink and looked at his daughter. Her
face was fuller than before, less sophisticated. And even
more beautiful.

“I mean, | do believe it,” she said with a small, scared
laugh. “It’s not like you and Mom would put on such a cruel
joke. Plus there’s your ... your age ... and the news and all. |
know it’s rea/, but | don’t believe it. Do you know what |
mean, Dad?”

“Yes,” said Sol.

“I mean | woke up this morning and | thought,
Great ... tomorrow’s the paleontology exam and I’ve hardly
studied. | was looking forward to showing Roger Sherman a
thing or two... he thinks he’s so smart.”

Sol took a drink. “Roger died three years ago in a plane
crash south of Bussard,” he said. He would not have spoken
without the whiskey in him, but he had to find out if there
was a Rachel hiding within the Rachel.

“| know,” said Rachel and pulled her knees up to her chin.
“| accessed everybody | knew. Gram’s dead. Professor
Eikhardt isn’t teaching anymore. Niki married
some ... salesman. A lot happens in four years.”

“More than eleven years,” said Sol. “The trip to and from
Hyperion left you six years behind us stay-at-homes.”

“But that’s normal,” cried Rachel. “People travel outside
the Web all the time. They cope.”

Sol nodded, “But this is different, kiddo.”

Rachel managed a Smile and drained the last of her
whiskey. “Boy, what an understatement.” She set the glass
down with a sharp, final sound. “Look, here’s what I’ve
decided. I’ve spent two and a half days going through all of
the stuff she ... | ... prepared to let me know what’s
happened, what’s going on... and /t just doesn’t help.”

Sol sat perfectly still, not even daring to breathe.

“I mean,” said Rachel, “Knowing that I’m getting younger
every day, losing the memory of people | haven’t even met

yet ... | mean, what happens next? | just keep getting
younger and smaller and less capable until | just disappear
someday? Jesus, Dad.” Rachel wrapped her arms more
tightly around her knees. “It’s sort of funny in a weird way,
isn’t it?”

“No,” Sol said quietly.

“No, I’m sure it’s not,” said Rachel. Her eyes, always large
and dark, were moist. “It must be the worst nightmare in the
world for you and Mom. Every day you have to watch me
come down the stairs ... confused ... waking up with
yesterday’s memories but hearing my own voice tell me that
yesterday was years ago. That | had a love affair with some
guy named Amelio ...”

“Melio,” whispered Sol.

“Whatever. It just doesn’t help, Dad. By the time | can
even begin to absorb it, I’m so worn out that | have to sleep.
Then ... well, you Know what happens then.”

“What ...” began Sol and had to clear his throat. “What do
you want us to do, little one?”

Rachel looked him in the eye and smiled. It was the same
smile she had gifted him with since her fifth week of life.
“Don’t tell me, Dad,” she said firmly. “Don’t let me tell me. It
just hurts. | mean, | didn’t /ive those times ...” She paused
and touched her forehead. “You know what | mean, Dad. The
Rachel who went to another planet and fell in love and got
hurt ... that was a different Rachel! | shouldn't have to suffer
her pain.” She was crying now. “Do you understand? Do
you?”

“Yes,” said Sol. He opened his arms and felt her warmth
and tears against his chest. “Yes, | understand.”

Fatline messages from Hyperion came frequently the next
year but they were all negative. The nature and source of
the anti-entropic fields had not been found. No unusual
time-tide activity had been measured around the Sphinx.

Experiments with laboratory animals in and around the tidal
regions had resulted in sudden death for some animals, but
the Merlin sickness had not been replicated. Melio ended
every message with “My love to Rachel.”

Sol and Sarai used money loaned from Reichs University to
receive limited Poulsen treatments in Bussard City. They
were already too old for the process to extend their lives for
another century, but it restored the look of a couple
approaching fifty standard rather than seventy. They studied
old family photos and found that it was not too difficult to
dress the way they had a decade and a half before.

Sixteen-year-old Rachel tripped down the stairs with her
comlog tuned to the college radio station. “Can | have rice
cereal?”

“Don’t you have it every morning?” smiled Sarai.

“Yes,” grinned Rachel. “I just thought we might be out or
something. | heard the phone. Was that Niki?”

“No,” said Sol.

“Damn,” said Rachel and glanced at them. “Sorry. But she
promised she'd call as soon as the standardized scores came
in. Three weeks since tutorials. You’d think I’d have heard
something.”

“Don’t worry,” said Sarai. She brought the coffeepot to the
table, started to pour Rachel a cup, poured it for herself.
“Don’t worry, honey. | promise you that your scores will be
good enough to get you into any school you want.”

“Mom,” sighed Rachel. “You don’t know. It’s a dog-eat-dog
world out there.” She frowned. “Have you seen my math
ansible? My room was all messed around. | couldn’t find
anything.”

Sol cleared his throat. “No classes today, kiddo.”

Rachel stared. “No classes? On a Tuesday? Six weeks from
graduation? What’s up?”

“You’ve been sick,” Sarai said firmly. “You can stay home
one day. Just today.”

Rachel’s frown deepened. “Sick? | don’t feel sick. Just sort
of weird. Like things aren’t ... aren’t right somehow. Like
why’s the couch moved around in the media room? And
where's Chips? | called and called but he didn’t come.”

Sol touched his daughter’s wrist. “You’ve been sick for a
while,” he said. “The doctor said you might wake up with a
few gaps. Let’s talk while we walk over to the campus. Want
to?”

Rachel brightened. “Skip classes and go to the college?
Sure.” She faked a look of consternation. “As long as we
don’t run into Roger Sherman. He’s taking freshman calculus
up there and he’s such a pain.”

“We won't see Roger,” said Sol. “Ready to go?”

“Almost.” Rachel leaned over and gave her mother a huge
hug. “ ’Later, alligator.”

“While, crocodile,” said Sarai.

“Okay,” grinned Rachel, her long hair bouncing. “I’m
ready.”

The constant trips to Bussard City had required the
purchase of an EMV and on a cool day in autumn Sol took
the slowest route, far below the traffic lanes, enjoying the
sight and smell of the harvested fields below. More than a
few men and women working in the fields waved to him.

Bussard had grown impressively since Sol’s childhood, but
the synagogue was still there on the edge of one of the
oldest neighborhoods in the city. The temple was old, Sol felt
old, even the yarmulke he put on as he entered seemed
ancient, worn thin by decades of use, but the rabbi was
young. Sol realized that the man was at least forty—his hair
was thinning on either side of the dark skullcap—but to Sol’s
eyes he was little more than a boy. Sol was relieved when

the younger man suggested that they finish their
conversation in the park across the street.

They sat on a park bench. Sol was surprised to find himself
still carrying the yarmulke, passing the cloth from hand to
hand. The day smelled of burning leaves and the previous
night’s rain.

“| don’t quite understand, M. Weintraub,” said the rabbi.
“Is it the dream you’re disturbed about or the fact that your
daughter has become ill since you began the dream?”

Sol raised his head to feel the sunlight on his face.
“Neither, exactly,” he said. “I just can’t help but feel that the
two are connected somehow.”

The rabbi ran a finger over his lower lip. “How old is your
daughter?”

“Thirteen,” said Sol after an imperceptible pause.

“And is the illness ... serious? Life threatening?”

“Not life threatening,” said Sol. “Not yet.”

The rabbi folded his arms across an ample belly. “You don’t
believe ... may | call you Sol?”

“Of course.”

“Sol, you don’t believe that by having this dream ... that
somehow you’ve caused your little girl’s illness. Do you?”

“No,” said Sol and sat a moment, wondering deep within if
he was telling the truth. “No, Rabbi, | don’t think ...”

“Call me Mort, Sol.”

“All right, Mort. | didn’t come because | believe that |—or
the dream—am causing Rachel’s illness. But | believe my
subconscious might be trying to tell me something.”

Mort rocked back and forth slightly. “Perhaps a neuro-
specialist or psychologist could help you more there, Sol. I’m
not sure what |...”

“I’m interested in the story of Abraham,” interrupted Sol.
“| mean, I've had some experience with different ethical
systems, but it’s hard for me to understand one which began
with the order to a father to slay his son.”

“No, no, no!” cried the rabbi, waving oddly childlike
fingers in front of him. “When the time came, God stayed
Abraham’s hand. He would not have allowed a human
sacrifice in His name. It was the obedience to the will of the
Lord that...”

“Yes,” said Sol. “Obedience. But it says, ‘Then Abraham
put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.’ God
must have looked into his soul and seen that Abraham was
ready to slay Isaac. A mere show of obedience without inner
commitment would not have appeased the God of Genesis.
What would have happened if Abraham had loved his son
more than he loved God?”

Mort drummed his fingers on his knee a moment and then
reached out to grasp Sol’s upper arm. “Sol, | can see you're
upset about your daughter’s illness. Don’t get it mixed up
with a document written eight thousand years ago. Tell me
more about your little girl. | mean, children don’t die of
diseases anymore. Not in the Web.”

Sol rose, smiled, and stepped back to free his arm. “I’d like
to talk more, Mort. | want to. But | have to get back. | have a
class this evening.”

“Will you come to temple this Sabbath?” asked the rabbi,
extending stubby fingers for a final human contact.

Sol dropped the yarmulke into the younger man’s hands.
“Perhaps one of these days, Mort. One of these days | will.”

Later the same autumn Sol looked out the window of his
study to see the dark figure of a man standing under the
bare elm in front of the house. The media, thought Sol, his
heart sinking. For a decade he had been dreading the day
the secret got out, knowing it would mean the end of their
simple life in Crawford. He walked out into the evening chill.
“Melio!” he said when he saw the tall man’s face.

The archaeologist stood with his hands in the pockets of
his long blue coat. Despite the ten standard years since their

last contact, Arundez had aged but little—Sol guessed that
he was still in his late twenties. But the younger man’s
heavily tanned face was lined with worry. “Sol,” he said and
extended his hand almost shyly.

Sol shook his hand warmly. “I didn’t Know you were back.
Come into the house.”

“No.” The archaeologist took a half step back. “I’ve been
out here for an hour, Sol. | didn’t have the courage to come
to the door.”

Sol started to speak but then merely nodded. He put his
hands in his own pockets against the chill. The first stars
were becoming visible above the dark gables of the house.
“Rachel’s not home right now,” he said at last. “She went to
the library. She ... she thinks she has a history paper due.”

Melio took a ragged breath and nodded in return. “Sol,” he
said, his voice thick, “you and Sarai need to understand that
we did everything we could. The team was on Hyperion for
almost three standard years. We would have stayed if the
university hadn’t cut our funds. There was nothing ...”

“We know,” said Sol. “We appreciated the fatline
messages.”

“| spent months alone in the Sphinx myself,” said Melio.
“According to the instruments, it was just an inert pile of
stones, but sometimes | thought | felt ... something....” He
shook his head again, “I failed her, Sol.”

“No,” said Sol and gripped the younger man’s shoulder
through the wool coat. “But | have a question. We’ve been in
touch with our senators ... even talked to the Science
Council directors ... but no one can explain to me why the
Hegemony hasn't spent more time and money investigating
the phenomena on Hyperion. It seems to me that they
should have invested that world into the Web long ago, if
only for its scientific potential. How can they ignore an
enigma like the Tombs?”

“I know what you mean, Sol. Even the early cutoff of our
funds was suspicious. It’s as if the Hegemony had a policy to

keep Hyperion at arm’s length.”

“Do you think ...” began Sol but at that moment Rachel
approached them in the autumn twilight. Her hands were
thrust deep in her red jacket, her hair was cut short in the
decades-old style of adolescents everywhere, and her full
cheeks were flushed with the cold. Rachel was teetering on
the brink of childhood and young adulthood; her long legs in
jeans, sports shoes, and bulky jacket might have been the
silhouette of a boy.

She grinned at them. “Hi, Dad.” Stepping closer in the dim
light, she nodded at Melio shyly. “Sorry, didn’t mean to
interrupt your conversation.”

Sol took a breath. “That’s all right, kiddo. Rachel, this is Dr.
Arundez from Reichs University on Freeholm. Dr. Arundez,
my daughter Rachel.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Rachel, beaming in earnest
now. “Wow, Reichs. I’ve read their catalogues. I’d /ove to go
there someday.”

Melio nodded rigidly. Sol could see the stiffness in his
shoulders and torso. “Do you, ...” began Melio. “That is, what
would you like to study there?”

Sol thought the pain in the man’s voice must be audible to
Rachel but she only shrugged and laughed. “Oh, jeez,
everything. Old Mr. Eikhardt—he’s the
paleontology/archaeology tute in the advanced class | take
up at the Ed Center—he says they have a great classics and
ancient artifacts department.”

“They do,” managed Melio.

Rachel glanced shyly from her father to the stranger,
apparently sensing the tension there but not knowing the
source. “Well, I’m just interrupting your conversation more
here. I’ve got to get in and get to bed. | guess I’ve had this
strange virus ... sort of like meningitis, Mom says, only it
must make me sort of goofy. Anyway, nice to meet you, Dr.
Arundez. | hope l'Il see you at Reichs someday.”

r

“| hope that too,” said Melio, staring at her so intensely in
the gloom that Sol had the feeling he was trying to
memorize everything about the instant.

“Okay, well ...” said Rachel and stepped back, her rubber-
soled shoes squeaking on the sidewalk, “good night, then.
See you in the morning, Dad.”

“Good night, Rachel.”

She paused at the doorway. The gaslight on the lawn
made her look much younger than thirteen. “ ‘Later,
alligators.”

“ "While, crocodile,” said Sol and heard Melio whisper it in
unison.

They stood awhile in silence, feeling the night settle on
the small town. A boy on a bicycle rode by, leaves crackling
under his wheels, spokes gleaming in the pools of light
under the old streetlamps. “Come in the house,” Sol said to
the silent man. “Sarai will be very pleased to see you. Rachel
will be asleep.”

“Not now,” said Melio. He was a shadow there, his hands
still in his pockets. “I need to ... it was a mistake, Sol.” He
started to turn away, looked back. “l'Il phone when | get to
Freeholm,” he said. “We'll get another expedition put
together.”

Sol nodded. Three years transit, he thought. /f they left
tonight she would be ... not quite ten before they arrive.
“Good,” he said.

Melio paused, raised a hand in farewell, and walked away
along the curb, ignoring the leaves that crunched underfoot.

Sol never saw him in person again.

° d ka

The largest Church of the Shrike in the Web was on Lusus
and Sol farcast there a few weeks before Rachel’s tenth
birthday. The building itself was not much larger than an Old
Earth cathedral, but it seemed gigantic with its effect of
flying buttresses in search of a church, twisted upper stories,

and support walls of stained glass. Sol’s mood was low and
the brutal Lusian gravity did nothing to lighten it. Despite
his appointment with the bishop, Sol had to wait more than
five hours before he was allowed into the inner sanctum. He
spent most of the time staring at the slowly rotating twenty-
meter, steel and polychrome sculpture which might have
been of the legendary Shrike ... and might have been an
abstract homage to every edged weapon ever invented.
What interested Sol the most were the two red orbs floating
within the nightmare space which might have been a skull.

“M. Weintraub?”

“Your Excellency,” said Sol. He noticed that the acolytes,
exorcists, lectors, and ostiaries who had kept him company
during the long wait had prostrated themselves on the dark
tiles at the high priest’s entry. Sol managed a formal bow.

“Please, please, do come in, M. Weintraub,” said the priest.
He indicated the doorway to the Shrike sanctuary with a
sweep of his robed arm.

Sol passed through, found himself in a dark and echoing
place not too dissimilar from the setting of his recurrent
dream, and took a seat where the bishop indicated. As the
cleric moved to his own place at what looked like a small
throne behind an intricately carved but thoroughly modern
desk, Sol noticed that the high priest was a native Lusian,
gone to fat and heavy in the jowls, but formidable in the way
all Lusus residents seemed to be. His robe was striking in its
redness ... a bright, arterial red, flowing more like a
contained liquid than like silk or velvet, trimmed in onyx
ermine. The bishop wore a large ring on each finger and
they alternated red and black, producing a disturbing effect
in Sol.

“Your Excellency,” began Sol, “Il apologize in advance for
any breach in church protocol which | have committed ... or
may commit. | confess | know little about the Church of the
Shrike, but what | do know has brought me here. Please

forgive me if | inadvertently display my ignorance by my
clumsy use of titles or terms.”

The bishop wiggled his fingers at Sol. Red and black
stones flashed in the weak light. “Titles are unimportant, M.
Weintraub. Addressing us as ‘Your Excellency’ is quite
acceptable for a nonbeliever. We must advise you, however,
that the formal name of our modest group is the Church of
the Final Atonement and the entity whom the world so
blithely calls ... the Shrike ... we refer to ... if we take His
name at all ... as the Lord of Pain or, more commonly, the
Avatar. Please proceed with the important query you said
you had for us.”

Sol bowed slightly. “Your Excellency, | am a teacher ...”

“Excuse us for interrupting, M. Weintraub, but you are
much more than a teacher. You are a scholar. We are very
familiar with your writings on moral hermeneutics. The
reasoning therein is flawed but quite challenging. We use it
regularly in our courses in doctrinal apologetics. Please
proceed.”

Sol blinked. His work was almost unknown outside the
most rarefied academic circles and this recognition had
thrown him. In the five seconds it took him to recover, Sol
found it preferable to believe that the Shrike bishop wanted
to know with whom he spoke and had an excellent staff.
“Your Excellency, my background is immaterial. | asked to
see you because my child ... my daughter ... has taken ill as
a possible result of research she was carrying out in an area
which is of some importance to your Church. | speak, of
course, of the so-called Time Tombs on the world of
Hyperion.”

The bishop nodded slowly. Sol wondered if he knew about
Rachel.

“You are aware, M. Weintraub, that the area you referred
to ... what we call the Covenant Arks ... have recently been
declared off limits to so-called researchers by the Home Rule
Council of Hyperion?”

“Yes, Your Excellency. | have heard that. | understand that
your Church was instrumental in that legislation being
passed.”

The bishop showed no response to this. Far off in the
incense-layered gloom, small chimes sounded.

“At any rate, Your Excellency, | hoped that some aspect of
your Church’s doctrine might shed light on my daughter's
illness.”

The bishop inclined his head forward so that the single
shaft of light which illuminated him gleamed on his forehead
and cast his eyes into shadow. “Do you wish to receive
religious instruction in the mysteries of the Church, M.
Weintraub?”

Sol touched his beard with a finger. “No, Your Excellency,
unless in so doing | might improve the well-being of my
daughter.”

“And does your daughter wish to be initiated into the
Church of the Final Atonement?”

Sol hesitated a beat. “Again, Your Excellency, she wishes
to be well. If joining the Church would heal or help her, it
would be a very serious consideration.”

The bishop sat back in a rustle of robes. Redness seemed
to flow from him into the gloom. “You speak of physical well-
being, M. Weintraub. Our Church is the final arbiter of
Spiritual salvation. Are you aware that the former invariably
flows from the latter?”

“I am aware that this is an old and widely respected
proposition,” said Sol. “The total well-being of our daughter
is the concern of my wife and myself.”

The bishop rested his massive head on his fist. “What is
the nature of your daughter’s illness, M. Weintraub?”

“It is ... a time-related illness, Your Excellency.”

The bishop sat forward, suddenly tense. “And at which of
the holy sites did you say your daughter contracted this
malady, M. Weintraub?”

“The artifact called the Sphinx, Your Excellency.”

The bishop stood so quickly that papers on his desktop
were knocked to the floor. Even without the robes, the man
would have massed twice Sol’s weight. In the fluttering red
robes, stretched to his full height, the Shrike priest now
towered over Sol like crimson death incarnate. “You can go!”
bellowed the big man. “Your daughter is the most blessed
and cursed of individuals. There is nothing that you or the
Church ... or any agent in this life ... can do for her.”

Sol stood ... or, rather, sat ... his ground. “Your Excellency,
if there is any possibility ...”

“NO!” cried the bishop, red in the face now, a
consummately consistent apparition. He tapped at his desk.
Exorcists and lectors appeared in the doorway, their black
robes with red trim an ominous echo of the bishop. The all-
black ostiaries blended with the shadows. “The audience is
at an end,” said the Bishop with less volume but infinite
finality. “Your daughter has been chosen by the Avatar to
atone in a way which all sinners and nonbelievers must
someday suffer. Someday very soon.”

“Your Excellency, if | can have just five minutes more of
your time...”

The bishop snapped his fingers and the exorcists came
forward to escort Sol out. The men were Lusian. One of them
could have handled five scholars Sols size.

“Your Excellency ...” cried Sol after he had shrugged off
the first mans hands. The three other exorcists came to
assist with the equally brawny lectors hovering nearby. The
bishop had turned his back and seemed to be staring into
the darkness.

The outer sanctuary echoed to grunts and the scraping of
Sols heels and to at least one loud gasp as Sol’s foot made
contact with the least priestly parts of the lead exorcist. The
outcome of the debate was not affected. Sol landed in the
street. The last ostiary to turn away tossed Sol’s battered hat
to him.

Ten more days on Lusus achieved nothing but more
gravity fatigue for Sol. The Temple bureaucracy would not
answer his calls. The courts could offer him no wedge. The
exorcists waited just within the doors of the vestibule.

Sol farcast to New Earth and Renaissance Vector, to Fuji
and TC2, to Deneb Drei and Deneb Vier, but everywhere the
Shrike temples were closed to him.

Exhausted, frustrated, out of money, Sol cast home to
Barnard’s World, got the EMV out of the long-term lot, and
arrived home an hour before Rachel’s birthday.

“Did you bring me anything, Daddy?” asked the excited
ten-year-old. Sarai had told her that day that Sol had been
gone.

Sol brought out the wrapped package. It was the collected
Anne of Green Gables series. It was not what he had wanted
to bring her.

“Can | open it?”

“Later, little one. With the other things.”

“Oh, please, Dad. Just one thing now. Before Niki and the
other kids get here?”

Sol caught Sarai’s eye. She shook her head. Rachel
remembered inviting Niki and Linna and her other friends to
the party only days before. Sarai had not yet come up with
an excuse.

“All right, Rachel,” he said. “Just this one before the party.”

While Rachel ripped into the small package, Sol saw the
giant package in the living room, secured with red ribbon.
The new bike, of course. Rachel had asked for the new bike
for a year before her tenth birthday. Sol tiredly wondered if
she would be surprised tomorrow to find, the new bike here
the day before her tenth birthday. Or perhaps they would
get rid of the bike that night, while Rachel slept.

Sol collapsed onto the couch. The red ribbon reminded
him of the bishop’s robes.

Sarai had never had an easy time of surrendering the past.
Every time she cleaned and folded and put away a set of
Rachel’s outgrown baby clothes, she had shed secret tears
that Sol somehow knew about. Sarai had treasured every
stage of Rachel’s childhood, enjoying the day-to-day
normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted
as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of
human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences,
the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the
memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but,
rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—the
weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged
in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections
casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of
such hours creating a synergy which was important and
eternal.

Sol found Sarai in the attic, weeping softly as she went
through boxes. These were not the gentle tears once shed
for the ending of small things. Sarai Weintraub was angry.

“What are you doing, Mother?”

“Rachel needs clothes. Everything is too big. What fit on
an eight-year-old won’t fit a seven-year-old. | have some
more of her things here somewhere.”

“Leave it,” said Sol. “We’ll buy something new.”

Sarai shook her head. “And have her wonder every day
where all of her favorite clothes have gone? No. I’ve saved
some things. They’re here somewhere.”

“Do it later.”

“Damn it, there is no later!” shouted Sarai and then turned
away from Sol and raised her hands to her face. “I’m sorry.”

Sol put his arms around her. Despite the limited Poulsen
treatments, her bare arms were much thinner than he
remembered. Knots and cords under rough skin. He hugged
her tightly.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, sobbing openly now. “It’s just
not fair.”

“No,” agreed Sol. “It’s not fair.” The sunlight coming
through the dusty attic panes had a sad, cathedral quality to
it. Sol had always loved the smell of an attic—the hot and
stale promise of a place so underused and filled with future
treasures. Today it was ruined.

He crouched next to a box. “Come, dear,” he said, “we'll
look together.”

Rachel continued to be happy, involved with life, only
Slightly confused by the incongruities which faced her each
morning when she awoke. As she grew younger it became
easier to explain away the changes that appeared to have
occurred overnight—the old elm out front gone, the new
apartment building on the corner where M. Nesbitt used to
live in a colonial-era home, the absence of her friends—and
Sol began to see as never before the flexibility of children.
He now imagined Rachel living on the breaking crest of the
wave of time, not seeing the murky depths of the sea
beyond, keeping her balance with her small store of
memories and a total commitment to the twelve to fifteen
hours of now allowed her each day.

Neither Sol nor Sarai wanted their daughter isolated from
other children and it was difficult to find ways to make
contact. Rachel was delighted to play with the “new girl” or
“new boy” in the neighborhood—children of other
instructors, the grandchildren of friends, for a while with
Niki’s daughter—but the other children had to grow
accustomed to Rachel greeting them anew each day,
remembering nothing of their common past, and only a few
had the sensitivity to continue such a charade for the sake
of a playmate.

The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in
Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the

college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town
knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small
towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some
people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone
else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly
the community folded its protective wings around the
Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its
young.

Still, they were allowed to live their lives, and even when
Sol had to cut back classes and then take an early
retirement because of trips seeking medical treatment for
Rachel, the real reason was mentioned by no one.

But it could not last, of course, and on the spring day
when Sol stepped onto the porch and saw his weeping
seven-year-old daughter coming back from the park
surrounded and followed by a pack of newsteeps, their
camera implants gleaming and comlogs extended, he knew
that a phase of their life was over forever. Sol jumped from
the porch and ran to Rachel’s side.

“M. Weintraub, is it true that your daughter contracted a
terminal time illness? What’s going to happen in seven
years? Will it just disappear?”

“M. Weintraub! M. Weintraub! Rachel says that she thinks
Raben Dowell is Senate CEO and this is the year A.D. 2711.
Has she lost those thirty-four years completely or is this a
delusion caused by the Merlin sickness?”

“Rachel! Do you remember being a grown woman? What’s
it feel like to be a kid again?”

“M. Weintraub! M. Weintraub! Just one still image, please.
How about you get a picture of Rachel when she was older
and you and the kid stand looking at it?”

“M. Weintraub! Is it true that this is the curse of the Time
Tombs? Did Rachel see the Shrike monster?”

“Hey, Weintraub! Sol! Hey, Solly! What’re you and the
little woman going to do when the kid’s gone?”

There was a newsteep blocking Sol’s way to the front door.
The man leaned forward, the stereo lenses of his eyes
elongating as they zoomed in for a close-up of Rachel. Sol
grabbed the man’s long hair—which was conveniently tied
in a queue—and flung him aside.

The pack brayed and bellowed outside the house for seven
weeks. Sol realized what he had known and forgotten about
very small communities: they were frequently annoying,
always parochial, sometimes prying on a one-to-one level,
but never had they subscribed to the vicious legacy of the
so-called “public’s right to know.”

The Web did. Rather than have his family become
permanent prisoners to the besieging reporters, Sol went on
the offensive. He arranged interviews on the most pervasive
farcaster cable news programs, participated in All Thing
discussions, and personally attended the Concourse Medical
Research Conclave. In ten standard months he asked for
help for his daughter on eighty worlds.

Offers poured in from ten thousand sources but the bulk of
the communications were from faith healers, project
promoters, institutes and free-lance researchers offering
their services in exchange for the publicity, Shrike cultists
and other religious zealots pointing out that Rachel
deserved the punishment, requests from various advertising
agencies for product endorsements, offers from media
agents to “handle” Rachel for such endorsements, offers of
sympathy from common people—frequently enclosing credit
chips, expressions of disbelief from scientists, offers from
holie producers and book publishers for exclusive rights to
Rachel’s life, and a barrage of real estate offers.

Reichs University paid for a team of evaluators to sort the
offers and see if anything might benefit Rachel. Most of the
communications were discarded. A few medical or research
offers were seriously considered. In the end, none seemed to
offer any avenue of research or experimental therapy which
Reichs had not already tried.

One fatline flimsy came to Sol’s attention. It was from the
Chairman of Kibbutz K’far Shalom on Hebron and read
simply:

IF IT BECOMES TOO MUCH, COME.

° è ka

It soon became too much. After the first few months of
publicity the siege seemed to lift, but this was only the
prelude to the second act. Faxsimmed tabloids referred to
Sol as the “Wandering Jew,” the desperate father wandering
afar in search of a cure for his child’s bizarre illness—an
ironic title given Sol’s lifelong dislike of travel. Sarai
inevitably was “the grieving mother.” Rachel was “the
doomed child” or, in one inspired headline, “Virgin Victim of
the Time Tombs’ Curse.” None of the family could go outside
without finding a newsteep or imager hiding behind a tree.

Crawford discovered that there was money to be found in
the Weintraubs’ misfortune. At first the town held the line,
but when entrepreneurs from Bussard City moved in with
gift shops, T-shirt concessions, tours, and datachip booths
for the tourists who were coming in larger and larger
numbers, the local business people first dithered, then
wavered, then decided unanimously that, if there was
commerce to be carried on, the profits should not go to
outsiders.

After four hundred and thirty-eight standard years of
comparative solitude, the town of Crawford received a
farcaster terminex. No longer did visitors have to suffer the
twenty-minute flight from Bussard City. The crowds grew.

On the day they moved it rained heavily and the streets
were empty. Rachel did not cry, but her eyes were very wide
all day and she spoke in subdued tones. It was ten days

before her sixth birthday. “But, Daddy, why do we have to
move?”

“We just do, honey.”

“But why?”

“It’s something we have to do, little one. You'll like Hebron.
There are lots of parks there.”

“But how come you never said we were going to move?”

“We did, sweetie. You must have forgotten.”

“But what about Gram and Grams and Uncle Richard and
Aunt Tetha and Uncle Saul and everybody?”

“They can come visit us any time.”

“But what about Niki and Linna and my friends?”

Sol said nothing but carried the last of the luggage to the
EMV.

The house was sold and empty; furniture had been sold or
sent ahead to Hebron. For a week there had been a steady
stream of family and old friends, college associates, and
even some of the Reichs med team who had worked with
Rachel for eighteen years, but now the street was empty.
Rain streaked the Perspex canopy of the old EMV and ran in
complex rivulets. The three of them sat in the vehicle for a
moment, staring at the house. The interior smelled of wet
wool and wet hair.

Rachel clutched the teddy bear Sarai had resurrected from
the attic six months earlier. She said, “It’s not fair.”

“No,” agreed Sol. “It’s not fair.”

Hebron was a desert world. Four centuries of terraforming
had made the atmosphere breathable and a few million
acres of land arable. The creatures which had lived there
before were small and tough and infinitely wary, and so were
the creatures imported from Old Earth, including the human
kind.

“Ahh,” gasped Sol the day they arrived in the sun-baked
village of Dan above the sun-baked kibbutz of K’far Shalom,
“what masochists we Jews are. Twenty thousand surveyed
worlds fit for our kind when the Hegira began, and those
schmucks came here.”

But it was not masochism which brought either the first
colonists or Sol and his family. Hebron was mostly desert,
but the fertile areas were almost frighteningly fertile. Sinai
University was respected throughout the Web and its Med
Center brought in wealthy patients and a healthy income for
the cooperative. Hebron had a single farcaster terminex in
New Jerusalem and allowed portals nowhere else. Belonging
to neither the Hegemony nor Protectorate, Hebron taxed
travelers heavily for farcaster privilege and allowed no
tourists outside New Jerusalem. For a Jew seeking privacy, it
was perhaps the safest place in three hundred worlds trod
by man.

The kibbutz was more a cooperative by tradition than in
operation. The Weintraubs were welcomed to their own
home—a modest place offering sun-dried adobe, curves
instead of right angles, and bare wood floors, but also
offering a view from the hill which showed an infinite
expanse of desert beyond the orange and olive groves. The
sun seemed to dry up everything, thought Sol, even worries
and bad dreams. The light was a physical thing. In the
evening their house glowed pink for an hour after the sun
had set.

Each morning Sol sat by his daughter’s bed until she
awoke. The first minutes of her confusion were always
painful to him, but he made sure that he was the first thing
Rachel saw each day. He held her while she asked her
questions.

“Where are we, Daddy?”

“In a wonderful place, little one. l'Il tell you all about it
over breakfast.”

“How did we get here?”

“By ‘casting and flying and walking a bit,” he would say.
“It’s not so far away ... but far enough to make it an
adventure.”

“But my bed’s here ... my stuffed animals ... why don’t |
remember coming?”

And Sol would hold her gently by the shoulders and look
into her brown eyes and say, “You had an accident, Rachel.
Remember in The Homesick Toad where Terrence hits his
head and forgets where he lives for a few days? It was sort of
like that.”

“Am | better?”

“Yes,” Sol would say, “you’re all better now.” And the
house would fill with the smell of breakfast and they would
go out to the terrace where Sarai waited.

Rachel had more playmates than ever. The kibbutz
cooperative had a school where she was always the
welcomed visitor, greeted anew each day. In the long
afternoons the children played in the orchards and explored
along the cliffs.

Avner, Robert, and Enhraim, the Council elders, urged Sol
to work on his book. Hebron prided itself on the number of
scholars, artists, musicians, philosophers, writers, and
composers it sheltered as citizens and long-term residents.
The house, they pointed out, was a gift of the state. Sol’s
pension, though small by Web standards, was more than
adequate for their modest needs in K’far Shalom. To Sol’s
surprise, however, he found that he enjoyed physical labor.
Whether working in the orchards or clearing stones in the
unclaimed fields or repairing a wall above the city, Sol found
that his mind and spirit were freer than they had been in
many years. He discovered that he could wrestle with

Kierkegaard while he waited for mortar to dry and find new
insights in Kant and Vandeur while carefully checking the
apples for worms. At the age of seventy-three standard, Sol
earned his first calluses.

In the evenings he would play with Rachel and then take a
walk in the foothills with Sarai as Judy or one of the other
neighbor girls watched their sleeping child. One weekend
they went away to New Jerusalem, just Sol and Sarai, the
first time they had been alone together for that long since
Rachel returned to live with them seventeen standard years
before.

But everything was not idyllic. Too frequent were the
nights when Sol awoke alone and walked barefoot down the
hall to see Sarai watching over Rachel in her sleep. And
often at the end of a long day, bathing Rachel in the old
ceramic tub or tucking her in as the walls glowed pinkly, the
child would say, “I like it here, Daddy, but can we go home
tomorrow?” And Sol would nod. And after the good-night
story, and the lullaby, and the good-night kiss, sure that she
was asleep, he would begin to tiptoe out of the room only to
hear the muffled “ ’Later, alligator” from the blanketed form
on the bed, to which he had to reply “ ’While, crocodile.”
And lying in bed himself, next to the softly breathing and
possibly sleeping length of the woman he loved, Sol would
watch the strips of pale light from one or both of Hebron’s
small moons move across the rough walls and he would talk
to God.

Sol had been talking to God for some months before he
realized what he was doing. The idea amused him. The
dialogues were in no way prayers but took the form of angry
monologues which—just short of the point where they
became diatribes—became vigorous arguments with himself.
Only not just with himself. Sol realized one day that the
topics of the heated debates were so profound, the stakes to

be settled so serious, the ground covered so broad, that the
only person he could possibly be berating for such
shortcomings was God Himself. Since the concept of a
personal God, lying awake at night worrying about human
beings, intervening in the lives of individuals always had
been totally absurd to Sol, the thought of such dialogues
made him doubt his sanity.

But the dialogues continued.

Sol wanted to know how any ethical system—much less a
religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil
mankind could throw at it—could flow from a command from
God for a man to slaughter his son. It did not matter to Sol
that the command had been rescinded at the last moment. It
did not matter that the command was a test of obedience. In
fact, the idea that it was the obedience of Abraham which
allowed him to become the father of all the tribes of Israel
was precisely what drove Sol into fits of fury.

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the
story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single,
unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept
or universal principal which put obedience above decent
behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

— So define “innocent”? came the vaguely amused, faintly querulous
voice which Sol associated with these arguments.

— A child is innocent, thought Sol. Isaac was. Rachel is.
— “Innocent” by the mere fact of being a child?
— Yes.

— And there is no situation where the blood of the innocent must be shed
for a greater cause?

— No, thought Sol. None.
— But the “innocent” are not restricted to children, | presume.

— Sol hesitated, sensing a trap, trying to see where his subconscious
interlocutor was heading. He could not. No, he thought, the “innocent”
include others as well as children.

— Such as Rachel? At age twenty-four? The innocent should not be
sacrificed at any age?

— That’s right.

— Perhaps this is part of the lesson which Abraham needed to learn before
he could be father to the blessed of the nations of the earth.

— What lesson? thought Sol. What lesson? But the voice in his mind had
faded and now there were only the sounds of night birds outside and the
soft breathing of his wife beside him.

Rachel could still read at age five. Sol had trouble
remembering when she had learned to read—it seemed she
always had been able to. “Four standard,” said Sarai, “It was
early summer ... three months after her birthday. We were
picnicking in the field above the college, Rachel was looking
at her Winnie-the-Pooh book, and suddenly she said, ‘I hear
a voice in my head.’ ”

Sol remembered then.

He also remembered the joy he and Sarai had felt at the
rapid acquisition of new skills Rachel had shown at that age.
He remembered because now they were confronted with the
reverse of that process.

“Dad,” said Rachel from where she lay on the floor of his
study, carefully coloring, “how long has it been since Mom’s
birthday?”

“It was on Monday,” said Sol, preoccupied with something
he was reading. Sarai’s birthday had not yet come but
Rachel remembered it.

“| know. But how long has it been since then?”

“Today is Thursday,” said Sol. He was reading a long
Talmudic treatise on obedience.

“| know. But how many days?”

Sol put down the hard copy. “Can you name the days of
the week?” Barnard’s World had used the old calendar.

“Sure,” said Rachel. “Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday ...”

“You said Saturday already.”

“Yeah. But how many days ago?”

“Can you count from Monday to Thursday?”

Rachel frowned, moved her lips. She tried again, counting
on her fingers this time, “Four days?”

“Good,” said Sot. “Can you tell me what 10 minus 4 is,
kiddo?”

“What does minus mean?”

Sol forced himself to look at his papers again. “Nothing,”
he said. “Something you'll learn at school.”

“When we go home tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

One morning when Rachel went off with Judy to play with
the other children—she was too young to attend school any
longer—Sarai said: “Sol, we have to take her to Hyperion.”

Sol stared at her. “What?”

“You heard me. We can’t wait until she is too young to
walk ... to talk. Also, we’re not getting any younger.” Sarai
barked a mirthless laugh. “That sounds strange, doesn’t it?
But we’re not. The Poulsen treatments will be wearing off in
a year or two.”

“Sarai, did you forget? The doctors all say that Rachel
could not survive cryogenic fugue. No one experiences FTL
travel without fugue state. The Hawking effect can drive one
mad ... Or worse.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Sarai. “Rachel has to return to
Hyperion.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” said Sol, angered.

Sarai gripped his hand. “Do you think you’re the only one
who has had the dream?”

“Dream?” managed Sol.

She sighed and sat at the white kitchen table. Morning
light struck the plants on the sill like a yellow spotlight. “The
dark place,” she said. “The red lights above. The voice.
Telling us to ... telling us to take ... to go to Hyperion. To
make ... an offering.”

Sol licked his lips but there was no moisture there. His
heart pounded. “Whose name ... whose name is called?”

Sarai looked at him strangely. “Both of our names. If you
weren’t there ... in the dream with me ... | could never have
borne it all these years.”

Sol collapsed into his chair. He looked down at the strange
hand and forearm lying on the table. The knuckles of the
hand were beginning to enlarge with arthritis; the forearm
was heavily veined, marked with liver spots. It was his hand,
of course. He heard himself say: “You never mentioned it.
Never said a word ...”

This time Sarai’s laugh was without bitterness. “As if | had
to! All hose times both of us coming awake in the dark. And
you covered with sweat. | knew from the first time that it was
not merely a dream. We have to go, Father. Go to Hyperion.”

Sol moved the hand. It still did not feel a part of him.
“Why? For God’s sake, why, Sarai? We can’t ... offer
Rachel ...”

“Of course not, Father. Haven’t you thought about this? We
have to go to Hyperion ... to wherever the dream tells us to
go ... and offer ourselves instead.”

“Offer ourselves,” repeated Sol. He wondered if he was
having a heart attack. His chest ached so terribly that he
could not take in a breath. He sat for a full minute in silence,
convinced that if he attempted to utter a word only a sob
would escape. After another minute he said: “How long have
you ... thought about this, Mother?”

“Do you mean known what we must do? A year. A little
more. Just after her fifth birthday.”

“A year! Why haven’t you said something?”

“I was waiting for you. To realize. To know.”

Sol shook his head. The room seemed far away and
Slightly tilted. “No. | mean, it doesn’t seem ... | have to think,
Mother.” Sol watched as the strange hand patted Sarai’s
familiar hand.

She nodded.

Sol spent three days and nights in the arid mountains,
eating only the thick-crusted bread he had brought and
drinking from his condenser therm.

Ten thousand times in the past twenty years he had
wished that he could take Rachel’s illness; that if anyone
had to suffer it should be the father, not the child. Any
parent would feel that way—did feel that way every time his
child lay injured or racked with fever. Surely it could not be
that simple.

In the heat of the third afternoon, as he lay half dozing in
the shade of a thin tablet of rock, Sol learned that it was not
that simple.

— Can that be Abraham’s answer to God? That he would be the offering,
not Issaac?

— It could have been Abraham's. It cannot be yours.
— Why?

As if in answer, Sol had the fever-vision of naked adults
filing toward the ovens past armed men, mothers hiding
their children under piles of coats. He saw men and women
with flesh hanging in burned strips carrying the dazed
children from the ashes of what once had been a city. Sol
knew that these images were no dreams, were the very stuff
of the First and Second Holocausts, and in his understanding
knew before the voice spoke in his mind what the answer
was. What it must be.

— The parents have offered themselves. That sacrifice already has been
accepted. We are beyond that.

— Then what? What!

Silence answered him. Sol stood in the full glare of the
sun, almost fell. A black bird wheeled overhead or in his
vision. Sol shook his fist at the gunmetal sky.

— You use Nazis as your instruments. Madmen. Monsters. You're a
goddamn monster yourself.

— No.

The earth tilted and Sol fell on his side against sharp
rocks. He thought that it was not unlike leaning against a
rough wall. A rock the size of his fist burned his cheek.

— The correct answer for Abraham was obedience, thought Sol. Ethically,
Abraham was a child himself. All men were at that time. The correct
answer for Abraham’s children was to become adults and to offer
themselves instead. What is the correct answer for us?

There was no answer. The ground and sky quit spinning.
After a while Sol rose shakily, rubbed the blood and grit from
his cheek, and walked down to the town in the valley below.

Ld e *

“No,” Sol told Sarai, “we will not go to Hyperion. It is not
the correct solution.”

“You would have us do nothing then.” Sarai’s lips were
white with answer but her voice was firmly in control.

“No. | would have us not do the wrong thing.”

Sarai expelled her breath in a hiss. She waved toward the
window where their four-year-old was visible playing with
her toy horses in the backyard. “Do you think she has time
for us to do the wrong thing ... or anything ... indefinitely?”

“Sit down, Mother.”

Sarai remained standing. There was the faintest sprinkling
of spilled sugar on the front of her tan cotton dress. Sol
remembered the young woman rising nude from the
phosphorescent wake of the motile isle on Maui-Covenant.

“We have to do something,” she said.

“We've seen over a hundred medical and scientific
experts. She’s been tested, prodded, probed, and tortured
by two dozen research centers. lve been to the Shrike
Church on every world in this Web; they won’t see me. Melio
and the other Hyperion experts at Reichs say that the Shrike
Cult has nothing like the Merlin sickness in their doctrine

and the indigenies on Hyperion have no legends of the
malady or clues to its cure. Research during the three years
the team was on Hyperion showed nothing. Now research
there is illegal. Access to the Time Tombs is granted only to
the so-called pilgrims. Even getting a travel visa to Hyperion
is becoming almost impossible. And if we take Rachel, the
trip may kill her.”

Sol paused for breath, touched Sarai’s arm again. “I’m
sorry to repeat all this, Mother. But we have done
something.”

“Not enough,” said Sarai. “What if we go as pilgrims?”

Sol folded his arms in frustration. “The Church of the
Shrike chooses its sacrificial victims from thousands of
volunteers. The Web is full of stupid, depressed people. Few
of these return.”

“Doesn’t that prove something?” Sarai whispered quickly,
urgently. “Somebody or something is preying on these
people.”

“Bandits,” said Sol.

Sarai shook her head. “The golem.”

“You mean the Shrike.”

“It’s the golem,” insisted Sarai. “The same one we see in
the dream.”

Sol was uneasy. “I don’t see a golem in the dream. What
golem?”

“The red eyes that watch,” said Sarai. “It’s the same golem
that Rachel heard that night in the Sphinx.”

“How do you know that she heard anything?”

“It’s in the dream,” said Sarai. “Before we enter the place
where the golem waits.”

“We haven’t dreamed the same dream,” said Sol. “Mother,
Mother ... why haven’t you told me this before?”

“I thought | was going mad,” whispered Sarai.

Sol thought of his secret conversations with God and put
his arm around his wife.

“Oh, Sol,” she whispered against him, “it hurts so much to
watch. And it’s so lonely here.”

Sol held her. They had tried to go home—home would
always be Barnard’s World—half a dozen times to visit family
and friends, but each time the visits were ruined by an
invasion of newsteeps and tourists. It was no one’s fault.
News traveled almost instantaneously through the
megadatasphere of a hundred and sixty Web worlds. To
scratch the curiosity itch one had only to pass a universal
card across a terminex diskey and step through a farcaster.
They had tried arriving unannounced and traveling
incognito but they were not spies and the efforts were
pitiful. Within twenty-four standard hours of their reentry to
the Web, they were besieged. Research institutes and large
med centers easily provided the security screen for such a
visit, but friends and family suffered. Rachel was news.

“Perhaps we could invite Tetha and Richard again
began Sarai.

“| have a better idea,” said Sol. “Go yourself, Mother. You
want to see your sister but you also want to see, hear, and
smell home ... watch a sunset where there are no
iguanas ... walk in the fields. Go.”

“Go? Just me? | couldn’t be away from Rachel ...”

“Nonsense,” said Sol. “Twice in twenty years—almost forty
if we count the good days before ... anyway, twice in twenty
years doesn’t constitute child neglect. It’s a wonder that this
family can stand one another, we’ve been cooped up
together so long.”

Sarai looked at the tabletop, lost in thought. “But wouldn’t
the news people find me?”

“I bet not,” said Sol. “It’s Rachel they seem to key on. If
they do hound you, come home. But | bet you can have a
week visiting everyone at home before the teeps catch on.”

“A week,” gasped Sarai. “I couldn’t ...”

“Of course you can. In fact, you must. It will give me a few
days to spend more time with Rachel and then when you

”

come back refreshed l'Il spend some days selfishly working
on the book.”

“The Kierkegaard one?”

“No. Something I’ve been playing with called The
Abraham Problem.”

“Clumsy title,” said Sarai.

“It’s a clumsy problem,” said Sol. “Now go get packed.
We'll fly you to New Jerusalem tomorrow so you can ‘cast out
before the Sabbath begins.”

“I'll think about it,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

“You'll pack,” said Sol, hugging her again. When the hug
was completed he had turned her away from the window so
that she faced the hallway and the bedroom door. “Go. When
you return from home I'll have thought of something we can
do.”

Sarai paused. “Do you promise?”

Sol looked at her. “I promise | will before time destroys
everything. | swear as Rachel’s father that l'Il find a way.”

Sarai nodded, more relaxed than he had seen her in
months. “l'Il go pack,” she said.

When he and the child returned from New Jerusalem the
next day, Sol went out to water the meager lawn while
Rachel played quietly inside. When he came in, the pink
glow of sunset infusing the walls with a sense of sea warmth
and quiet, Rachel was not in her bedroom or the other usual
places. “Rachel?”

When there was no answer he checked the backyard
again, the empty street.

“Rachel!” Sol ran in to call the neighbors but suddenly
there was the slightest of sounds from the deep closet Sarai
used for storage. Sol quietly opened the screen panel.

Rachel sat beneath the hanging clothes, Sarai’s antique
pine box open between her legs. The floor was littered with
photos and holo-chips of Rachel as a high school student,

Rachel on the day she set off for college, Rachel standing in
front of a carved mountainside on Hyperion. Rachel’s
research comlog lay whispering on the four-year-old Rachel’s
lap. Sol’s heart seized at the familiar sound of the confident
young woman’s voice.

“Daddy,” said the child on the floor, her own voice a tiny
frightened echo of the voice on the comlog, “you never told
me that | had a sister.”

“You don’t, little one.”

Rachel frowned. “Is this Mommy when she was ... not so
big? Uh-uh, it can’t be. Her name’s Rachel, too, she says.
How can...”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I'll explain ...” Sol realized that the
phone was ringing in the living room, had been ringing. “Just
a moment, sweetie. l'Il be right back.”

The holo that formed above the pit was of a man Sol had
never seen before. Sol did not activate his own imager,
eager to get rid of the caller. “Yes?” he said abruptly.

“M. Weintraub? M. Weintraub who used to live on
Barnard’s World, currently in the village of Dan on Hebron?”

Sol started to disconnect and then paused. Their access
code was unfiled. Occasionally a salesperson called from
New Jerusalem, but offworld calls were rare. And, Sol
suddenly realized, his stomach feeling a stab of cold, it was
past sundown on the Sabbath. Only emergency holo calls
were allowed.

“Yes?” said Sol.

“M. Weintraub,” said the man, staring blindly past Sol,
“there’s been a terrible accident.”

° d ka

When Rachel awoke her father was sitting by the side of
her bed. He looked tired. His eyes were red and his cheeks
were gray with stubble above the line of his beard.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

“Good morning, sweetheart.”

Rachel looked around and blinked. Some of her dolls and
toys and things were there, but the room was not hers. The
light was different. The air felt different. Her daddy looked
different. “Where are we, Daddy?”

“We've gone on a trip, little one.”

“Where to?”

“It doesn’t matter right now. Hop out, sweetie. Your bath is
ready and then we have to get dressed.”

A dark dress she had never seen before lay at the base of
her bed. Rachel looked at the dress and then back at her
father. “Daddy, what’s the matter? Where’s Mommy?”

Sol rubbed his cheek. It was the third morning since the
accident. It was the day of the funeral. He had told her each
of the preceding days because he could not imagine lying to
her then; it seemed the ultimate betrayal—of both Sarai and
Rachel. But he did not think he could do it again. “There’s
been an accident, Rachel,” he said, his voice a pained rasp.
“Mommy died. We’re going to go say goodbye to her today.”
Sol paused. He knew by now that it would take a minute for
the fact of her mother’s death to become real for Rachel. On
the first day he had not known if a four-year-old could truly
comprehend the concept of death. He knew now that Rachel
could.

Later, as he held the sobbing child, Sol tried to understand
the accident he had described so briefly to her. EMVs were
by far the safest form of personal transportation mankind
had ever designed. Their lifters could fail but, even so, the
residual charge in the EM generators would allow the aircar
to descend safely from any altitude. The basic, failsafe
design of an EMV’s collision-avoidance equipment had not
changed in centuries. But everything failed. In this case it
was a joy-riding teenage couple in a stolen EMV outside the
traffic lanes, accelerating to Mach 1.5 with all lights and
transponders off to avoid detection, who defied all odds by
colliding with Aunt Tetha’s ancient Vikken as it descended
toward the Bussard City Opera House landing apron. Besides

Tetha and Sarai and the teenagers, three others died in the
crash as pieces of falling vehicles cartwheeled into the
crowded atrium of the Opera House itself.

Sarai.

“Will we ever see Mommy again?” Rachel asked between
sobs. She had asked this each time.

“| don’t know, sweetheart,” responded Sol truthfully.

The funeral was at the family cemetery in Kates County on
Barnard’s World. The press did not invade the graveyard
itself but teeps hovered beyond the trees and pressed
against the black iron gate like an angry storm tide.

Richard wanted Sol and Rachel to stay a few days, but Sol
knew what pain would be inflicted on the quiet farmer if the
press continued their assault. Instead, he hugged Richard,
spoke briefly to the clamoring reporters beyond the fence,
and fled to Hebron with a stunned and silent Rachel in tow.

Newsteeps followed to New Jerusalem and then attempted
to follow to Dan, but military police overrode their chartered
EMVs, threw a dozen in jail as an example, and revoked the
farcaster visas of the rest.

In the evening Sol walked the ridge lines above the village
while Judy watched his sleeping child. He found that his
dialogue with God was audible now and he resisted the urge
to shake his fist at the sky, to shout obscenities, to throw
stones. Instead he asked questions, always ending with—
Why?

There was no answer. Hebron’s sun set behind distant
ridges and the rocks glowed as they gave up their heat. Sol
sat on a boulder and rubbed his temples with his palms.

Sarai.

They had lived a full life, even with the tragedy of Rachel’s
illness hanging over them. It was too ironic that in Sarai’s

first hour of relaxation with her sister ... Sol moaned aloud.

The trap, of course, had been in their total absorption with
Rachel’s illness. Neither had been able to face the future
beyond Rachel’s ... death? Disappearance? The world had
hinged upon each day theif child lived and no thought had
been given to the chance of accident, the perverse antilogic
of a sharp-edged universe. Sol was sure that Sarai had
considered suicide just as he had, but neither of them could
ever have abandoned the other. Or Rachel. He had never
considered the possibility of being alone with Rachel
when ...

Sarai!

At that moment Sol realized that the often angry dialogue
which his people had been having with God for so many
millennia had not ended with the death of Old Earth ... nor
with the new Diaspora ... but continued still. He and Rachel
and Sarai had been part of it, were part of it now. He let the
pain come. It filled him with the sharp-edged agony of
resolve.

Sol stood on the ridge line and wept as darkness fell.

In the morning he was next to Rachel’s bed when sunlight
filled the room.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

“Good morning, sweetheart.”

“Where are we, Daddy?”

“We've gone on a trip. It’s a pretty place.”

“Where’s Mommy?”

“She’s with Aunt Tetha today.”

“Will we see her tomorrow?”

“Yes,” said Sol. “Now let’s get you dressed and l'Il make
breakfast.”

Sol began to petition the Church of the Shrike when
Rachel turned three. Travel to Hyperion was severely limited
and access to the Time Tombs had become all but

impossible. Only the occasional Shrike Pilgrimage sent
people to that region.

Rachel was sad that she had to be away from her mother
on her birthday but the visit of several children from the
kibbutz distracted her a bit. Her big present was an
illustrated book of fairy tales which Sarai had picked out in
New Jerusalem months before.

Sol read some of the stories to Rachel before bedtime. It
had been seven months since she could read any of the
words herself. But she loved the _ stories—especially
“Sleeping Beauty”—and made her father read it to her twice.

“I’m gonna show Mommy it when we get home,” she said
through a yawn as Sol turned out the overhead light.

“Good night, kiddo,” he said softly, pausing at the door.

“Hey, Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Later, alligator.”

“While, crocodile.”

Rachel giggled into her pillow.

It was, Sol thought during the final two years, not so much
different from watching a loved one falling into old age. Only
worse. A thousand times worse.

Rachel’s permanent teeth had fallen out over intervals
between her eighth and second birthdays. Baby teeth
replaced them but by her eighteenth month half of these
had receded into her jaw.

Rachel’s hair, always her one vanity, grew shorter and
thinner. Her face lost its familiar structure as baby fat
obscured the cheekbones and firm chin. Her coordination
failed by degrees, noticeable at first in a sudden clumsiness
as she handled a fork or pencil. On the day she could no
longer walk, Sol put her down in her crib early and then
went into his study to get thoroughly and quietly drunk.

Language was the hardest for him. Her vocabulary loss
was like the burning of a bridge between them, the severing
of a final line of hope. It was sometime after her second
birthday receded that Sol tucked her in and, pausing in the
doorway, said, “ ‘Later, alligator.”

“Huh?”

“See you later, alligator.”

Rachel giggled.

“You say—’In a while, crocodile,’ ” said Sol. He told her
what an alligator and crocodile were.

“In a while, ‘acadile,” giggled Rachel.

In the morning she had forgotten.

Sol took Rachel with him as he traveled the Web—no
longer caring about the newsteeps—petitioning the Shrike
Church for pilgrimage rights, lobbying the Senate for a visa
and access to forbidden areas on Hyperion, and visiting any
research institute or clinic which might offer a cure. Months
were lost while more medics admitted failure. When he fled
back to Hebron, Rachel was fifteen standard months old; in
the ancient units used on Hebron she weighed twenty-five
pounds and measured thirty inches tall. She could no longer
dress herself. Her vocabulary consisted of twenty-five words,
of which her favorites were “Mommy” and “Daddy.”

Sol loved carrying his daughter. There were times when
the curve of her head against his cheek, her warmth against
his chest, the smell of her skin—all worked to allow him to
forget the fierce injustice of it all. At those times Sol would
have been temporarily at peace with the universe if only
Sarai had been there. As it was, there were temporary cease-
fires in his angry dialogue with a God in Whom he did not
believe.

— What possible reason can there be for this?

— What reason has been visible for all of the forms of pain suffered by
humankind?

— Precisely, thought Sol, wondering if he had just won a point for the first
time. He doubted it.

— The fact of a thing not being visible does not mean it does not exist.

— That’s clumsy. It shouldn’t take three negatives to make a statement.
Especially to state something as nonprofound as that.

— Precisely, Sol. You’re beginning to get the drift of all this.
— What?

There was no answer to his thoughts. Sol lay in his house
and listened to the desert wind blow.

Rachel’s last word was “Mamma,” uttered when she was
just over five months old.

She awoke in her crib and did not—could not—ask where
she was. Her world was one of mealtimes, naps, and toys.
Sometimes when she cried Sol wondered if she was crying
for her mother.

Sol shopped in the small stores in Dan, taking the infant
with him as he selected diapers, nursing paks, and the
occasional new toy.

The week before Sol left for Tau Ceti Center, Ephraim and
the two other elders came to talk. It was evening and the
fading light glowed on Ephraim’s bald scalp. “Sol, we're
worried about you. The next few weeks will be hard. The
women want to help. We want to help.”

Sol laid his hand on the older man’s forearm. “It’s
appreciated, Ephraim. Everything the last few years is
appreciated. This is our home now, too. Sarai would
have ... would have wanted me to say thank you. But we're
leaving on Sunday. Rachel is going to get better.”

The three men on the long bench looked at one another.
Avner said, “They've found a cure?”

“No,” said Sol, “but I’ve found a reason to hope.”

“Hope is good,” Robert said in cautious tones.

Sol grinned, his teeth white against the gray of his beard.
“It had better be,” he said. “Sometimes it is all we’re given.”

The studio holo camera zoomed in for a close-up of Rachel
as the infant sat cradled in Sol’s arm on the set of “Common
Talk.” “So you're saying,” said Devon Whiteshire, the show’s
host and third-best-known face in the Web datasphere, “that
the Shrike Church’s refusal to allow you to return to the Time
Tombs ... and the Hegemony’s tardiness in processing a
visa... these things will doom your child to
this ... extinction?”

“Precisely,” said Sol. “The voyage to Hyperion cannot be
made in under six weeks. Rachel is now twelve weeks old.
Any further delay by either the Shrike Church or the Web
bureaucracy will kill this child.”

The studio audience stirred. Devon Whiteshire turned
toward the nearest imaging remote. His craggy, friendly
visage filled the monitor frame. “This man doesn’t know if he
can save his child,” said Whiteshire, his voice powerful with
subtle feeling, “but all he asks is a chance. Do you think
he ... and the baby ... deserve one? If so, access your
planetary representatives and your nearest Church of the
Shrike temple. The number of your nearest temple should be
appearing now.” He turned back to Sol. “We wish you luck,
M. Weintraub. And”—Whiteshire’s large hand touched
Rachel’s cheek—“we wish you Godspeed, our young friend.”

The monitor image held on Rachel until it faded to black.

The Hawking effect caused nausea, vertigo, headache,
and hallucinations. The first leg of the voyage was the ten-
day transit to Parvati on the Hegemony torchship HS
Intrepid.

Sol held Rachel and endured. They were the only people
fully conscious aboard the warship. At first Rachel cried, but

after some hours she lay quietly in Sol’s arms and stared up
at him with large, dark eyes. Sol remembered the day she
was born—the medics had taken the infant from atop Sarai’s
warm stomach and handed her to Sol. Rachel’s dark hair was
not much shorter then, her gaze no less profound.

Eventually they slept from sheer exhaustion.

Sol dreamed that he was wandering through a structure
with columns the size of redwood trees and a ceiling lost to
sight far above him. Red light bathed cool emptiness. Sol
was surprised to find that he still carried Rachel in his arms.
Rachel as a child had never been in his dream before. The
infant looked up at him and Sol felt the contact of her
consciousness as surely as if she had spoken aloud.

Suddenly a different voice, immense and cold, echoed
through the void:

“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, Whom you love,
and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering
at one of the places of which | shall tell you.”

Sol hesitated and looked back to Rachel. The baby’s eyes
were deep and luminous as she looked up at her father. Sol
felt the unspoken yes. Holding her tightly, he stepped
forward into the darkness and raised his voice against the
silence:

“Listen! There will be no more offerings, neither child nor parent. There
will be no more sacrifices for anyone other than our fellow human. The
time of obedience and atonement is past.”

Sol listened. He could feel the pounding of his heart and
Rachel’s warmth against his arm. From somewhere high
above there came the cold sound of wind through unseen
fissures. Sol cupped his hand to his mouth and shouted:

“That’s all! Now either leave us alone or join us as a father rather than a
receiver of sacrifices. You have the choice of Abraham!”

Rachel stirred in his arms as a rumble grew out of the
stone floor. Columns vibrated. The red gloom deepened and
then winked out, leaving only darkness. From far away there
came the boom of huge footsteps. Sol hugged Rachel to him
as a violent wind roared past.

There was a glimmer of light as both he and Rachel awoke
on the HS Intrepid outward bound for Parvati to transfer to
the treeship Yggdrasill for the planet Hyperion. Sol smiled at
his seven-week-old daughter. She smiled back.

It was her last or her first smile.

The main cabin of the windwagon was silent when the old
scholar finished his story. Sol cleared his throat and took a
drink of water from a crystal goblet. Rachel slept on in the
makeshift cradle of the open drawer. The windwagon rocked
gently on its way, the rumble of the great wheel and the
hum of the main gyroscope a lulling background noise.

“My God,” Brawne Lamia said softly. She started to speak
again and then merely shook her head.
Martin Silenus closed his eyes and said:

“Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence

And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,

And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face will scowl

And every windy quarter howl

Or every bellows burst, be happy still.”

Sol Weintraub asked, “William Butler Yeats?”
Silenus nodded. “ ‘A Prayer for My Daughter.’ ”

“I think I’m going up on deck for a breath of air before
turning in,” said the Consul. “Would anyone care to join
me?”

Everyone did. The breeze of their passage was refreshing
as the group stood on the quarterdeck and watched the
darkened Sea of Grass rumble by. The sky was a great, star-
splashed bowl above them, scarred by meteor trails. The
sails and rigging creaked with a sound as old as human
travel.

“I think we should post guards tonight,” said Colonel
Kassad. “One person on watch while the others sleep. Two-
hour intervals.”

“| agree,” said the Consul. “lIl take the first watch.”

“In the morning ...” began Kassad.

“Look!” cried Father Hoyt.

They followed his pointing arm. Between the blaze of
constellations, colored fireballs flared—green, violet, orange,
green again—illuminating the great plain of grass around
them like flashes of heat lightning. The stars and meteor
trails paled to insignificance beside the sudden display.

“Explosions?” ventured the priest.

“Space battle,” said Kassad. “Cislunar. Fusion weapons.”
He went below quickly.

“The Tree,” said Het Masteen, pointing to a speck of light
which moved among the explosions like an ember floating
through a fireworks display.

Kassad returned with his powered binoculars and handed
them around.

“Ousters?” asked Lamia. “Is it the invasion?”

“Ousters, almost certainly,” said Kassad. “But almost as
certainly just a scouting raid. See the clusters? Those are
Hegemony missiles being exploded by the Ouster
ramscouts’ countermeasures.”

The binoculars came to the Consul. The flashes were quite
clear now, an expanding cumulus of flame. He could see the

speck and long blue tail of at least two scoutships fleeing
from the Hegemony pursuers.

“| don’t think ...” began Kassad and then stopped as the
ship and sails and Sea of Crass glowed, bright orange in
reflected glare.

“Dear Christ,” whispered Father Hoyt. “They’ve hit the
treeship.”

The Consul swept the glasses left. The growing nimbus of
flames could be seen with the naked eye but in the
binoculars the kilometer-long trunk and branch array of the
Yggdrasill was visible for an instant as it burned and flared,
long tendrils of flame arcing away into space as the
containment fields failed and the oxygen burned. The
orange cloud pulsed, laded, and fell back on itself as the
trunk became visible for a final second even as it glowed
and broke up like the last long ember in a dying fire. Nothing
could have survived. The treeship Yggdrasill with its crew
and complement of clones and semisentient erg drivers was
dead.

The Consul turned toward Het Masteen and belatedly held
out the binoculars. “I’m so... sorry,” he whispered.

The tall Templar did not take the glasses. Slowly he
lowered his gaze from the skies, pulled forward his cowl, and
went below without a word.

The death of the treeship was the final explosion. When
ten minutes had passed and no more flares had disturbed
the night, Brawne Lamia spoke. “Do you think they got
them?”

“The Ousters?” said Kassad. “Probably not. The scoutships
are built for soeed and defense. They’re light-minutes away
by now.”

“Did they go after the treeship on purpose?” asked
Silenus. The poet sounded very sober.

“I think not,” said Kassad. “Merely a target of opportunity.”

“Target of opportunity,” echoed Sol Weintraub. The scholar
shook his head. “I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep before

sunrise.”

One by one the others went below. When only Kassad and
the Consul were left on deck, the Consul said, “Where should
| stand watch?”

“Make a circuit,” said the Colonel. “From the main corridor
at the base of the ladder you can see all of the stateroom
doors and the entrance to the mess and galley. Come above
and check the gangway and decks. Keep the lanterns lit. Do
you have a weapon?”

The Consul shook his head.

Kassad handed over his deathwand. “It’s on tight beam—
about half a meter at ten meters’ range. Don’t use it unless
you're sure that there’s an intruder. The rough plate that
Slides forward is the safety. It’s on.”

The Consul nodded, making sure that his finger stayed
away from the firing stud.

“I'll relieve you in two hours,” said Kassad. He checked his
comlog. “It’ll be sunrise before my watch is over.” Kassad
looked at the sky as if expecting the Yggdrasill to reappear
and continue its firefly path across the sky. Only the stars
glowed back. On the northeastern horizon a moving mass of
black promised a storm.

Kassad shook his head. “A waste,” he said and went below.

The Consul stood there awhile and listened to the wind in
the canvas, the creek of rigging, and the rumble of the
wheel. After a while he went to the railing and stared at
darkness while he thought.

Sunrise over the Sea of Grass was a thing of beauty. The
Consul watched from the highest point on the aft deck. After
his watch he had tried to sleep, given it up, and come up
onto deck to watch the night fade into day. The stormfront
had covered the sky with low clouds and the rising sun lit
the world with brilliant gold reflected from above and below.
The windwagon’s sails and lines and weathered planks
glowed in the brief benediction of light in the few minutes
before the sun was blocked by the ceiling of clouds and
color flowed out of the world once again. The wind which
followed this curtain closing was chill, as if it had blown
down from the snowy peaks of the Bridle Range fust visible
as a dark blur on the northeastern horizon.

Brawne Lamia and Martin Silcnus joined the Consul on the
aft deck, each nursing a cup of coffee from the galley. The
wind whipped and tugged at the rigging. Brawne Lamia’s
thick mass of curls fluttered around her face like a dark
nimbus.

“Morning,” muttered Silenus, squinting out over his coffee
cup at the wind-rippled Sea of Grass.

“Good morning,” replied the Consul, amazed at how alert
and refreshed he felt for not having slept at all the night
before. “We have a headwind, but the wagon still seems to
be making decent time. Well definitely be to the mountains
before nightfall.”

“Hrrgnn,” commented Silenus and buried his nose in the
coffee cup.

“I didn’t sleep at all last night,” said Brawne Lamia, “just
for thinking about M. Weintraub’s story.”

“| don’t think ...” began the poet and then broke off as
Weintraub came onto deck, his baby peering over the lip of
an infant carrier sling on his chest.

“Good morning, everyone,” said Weintraub, looking
around and taking a deep breath. “Mmm, brisk, isn’t it?”

“Fucking freezing,” said Silenus. “North of the mountains
it’ll be even worse.”

“I think l'Il go down to get a jacket,” said Lamia, but before
she could move there came a single shrill cry from the deck
below.

“Blood!”

There was, indeed, blood everywhere. Het Masteen’s cabin
was strangely neat—bed unslept in, travel trunk and other
boxes stacked precisely in one corner, robe folded over a
chair—except for the blood which covered great sections of
the deck, bulkhead, and overhead. The six pilgrims crowded
just inside the entrance, reluctant to go farther in.

“I was passing on my way to the upper deck,” said Father
Hoyt, his voice a strange monotone. “The door was slightly
ajar. | caught a glimpse of ... the blood on the wall.”

“Is it blood?” demanded Martin Silenus.

Brawne Lamia stepped into the room, ran a hand through
a thick smear on the bulkhead, and raised her fingers to her
lips. “It’s blood.” She looked around, walked to the wardrobe,
looked briefly among the empty shelves and hangers, and
then went to the small porthole. It was latched and bolted
from the inside.

Lenar Hoyt looked more ill than usual and staggered to a
chair. “Is he dead then?”

“We don’t know a damn tiling except that Captain
Masteen isn’t in his room and a lot of blood /s,” said Lamia.
She wiped her hand on her pant leg. “The thing to do now is
search the ship thoroughly.”

“Precisely,” said Colonel Kassad, “and if we do not find the
Captain?”

Brawne Lamia opened the porthole. Fresh air dissipated
the slaughterhouse smell of blood and brought in the rumble
of the wheel and the rustle of grass under the hull. “If we
don’t find Captain Masteen,” she said, “then we assume that
he either left the ship under his own will or was taken off.”

“But the blood ...” began Father Hoyt.

“Doesn’t prove anything,” finished Kassad. “M. Lamia’s
correct. We don’t know Masteen’s blood type or genotype.
Did anyone see or hear anything?”

There was silence except for negative grunts and the
Shaking of heads.

Martin Silenus looked around. “Don’t you people recognize
the work of our friend the Shrike when you see it?”

“We don’t know that,” snapped Lamia. “Maybe someone
wanted us to think that it was the Shrike’s doing.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Hoyt, still gasping for air.

“Nonetheless,” said Lamia, “we’ll search in twos. Who has
weapons besides myself?”

“I do,” said Colonel Kassad. “I have extras if needed.”

“No,” said Hoyt.

The poet shook his head.

Sol Weintraub had returned to the corridor with his child.
Now he looked in again. “I have nothing,” he said.

“No,” said the Consul. He had returned the deathwand to
Kassad when his shift ended two hours before first light.

‘All right,” said Lamia, “the priest will come with me on the
lower deck. Silenus, go with the Colonel. Search the mid-
deck. M. Weintraub, you and the Consul check everything
above. Look for anything out of the ordinary. Any sign of
struggle.”

“One question,” said Silenus.

“What?”

“Who the hell elected you queen of the prom?”

“I’m a private investigator,” said Lamia, leveling her gaze
on the poet.

Martin Silenus shrugged. “Hoyt here is a priest of some
forgotten religion. That doesn’t mean we have to genuflect
when he says Mass.”

‘All right,” sighed Brawne Lamia. “I'll give you a better
reason.” The woman moved so fast that the Consul almost
missed the action in a blink. One second she was standing
by the open port and in the next she was halfway across the
stateroom, lifting Martin Silenus off the deck with one arm,
her massive hand around the poet’s thin neck. “How about,”
she said, “that you do the logical thing because it’s the
logical thing to do?”

“Gkkrgghh,” managed Martin Silenus.

“Good,” said Lamia without emotion and dropped the poet
to the deck. Silenus staggered a meter and almost sat on
Father Hoyt.

“Here,” said Kassad, returning with two small neural
stunners. He handed one to Sol Weintraub. “What do you
have?” Kassad asked Lamia.

The woman reached into a pocket of her loose tunic and
produced an ancient pistol.

Kassad looked at the relic fora moment and then nodded.
“Stay with your partner,” he said. “Don’t shoot at anything
unless it’s” positively identified and unquestionably
threatening.”

“That describes the bitch | plan to shoot,” said Silenus,
still massaging his throat.

Brawne Lamia took a half step toward the poet. Fedmahn
Kassad said, “Shut up. Let’s get this over with.” Silenus
followed the Colonel out of the stateroom.

Sol Weintraub approached the Consul, handed him the
stunner. “I don’t want to hold this thing with Rachel. Shall
we go up?”

The Consul took the weapon and nodded.

The windwagon held no further sign of Templar Voice of
the Tree Het Masteen. After an hour of searching, the group
met in the stateroom of the missing man. The blood there
seemed darker and drier.

“Is there a chance that we missed something?” said Father
Hoyt. “Secret passages? Hidden compartments?”

“There’s a chance,” said Kassad, “but | swept the ship with
heat and motion sensors. If there’s anything else on board
larger than a mouse, | can’t find it.”

“If you had these sensors,” said Silenus, “why the fuck did
you have us crawling through bilge and byways for an
hour?”

“Because the right equipment or apparel can hide a man
from a heat-’n’-beat search.”

“So, in answer to my question,” said Hoyt, pausing a
second as a visible wave of pain passed through him, “with
the right equipment or apparel, Captain Masteen might be
hiding in a secret compartment somewhere.”

“Possible but improbable,” said Brawne Lamia. “My guess
is that he’s no longer aboard.”

“The Shrike,” said Martin Silenus in a disgusted tone. It
was not a question.

“Perhaps,” said Lamia. “Colonel, you and the Consul were
on watch through those four hours. Are you sure that you
heard and saw nothing?”

Both men nodded.

“The ship was quiet,” said Kassad. “I would have heard a
struggle even before | went on watch.”

“And | didn’t sleep after my watch,” said the Consul. “My
room shared a bulkhead with Masteen’s. | heard nothing.”

“Well,” said Silenus, “we’ve heard from the two men who
were creeping around in the dark with weapons when the
poor shit was killed. They say they’re innocent. Next case!”

“If Masteen was killed,” said Kassad, “it was with no
deathwand. No silent modern weapon | know throws that

much blood around. There were no gunshots heard—no
bullet holes found—so | presume M. Lamia’s automatic pistol
is not suspect. If this is Captain Masteen’s blood, then |
would guess an edged weapon was used.”

“The Shrike is an edged weapon,” said Martin Silenus.

Lamia moved to the small stack of luggage. “Debating
isn’t going to solve anything, Let’s see if there’s anything in
Masteen’s belongings.”

Father Hoyt raised a hesitant hand. “That’s ... well, private,
isn’t it? | don’t think we have the right.”

Brawne Lamia crossed her arms. “Look, Father, if Maste
en’s dead, it doesn’t matter to him. If he’s still alive, looking
through this stuff might give us some idea where he was
taken. Either way, we have to try to find a clue.”

Hoyt looked dubious but nodded. In the end, there was
little invasion of privacy. Masteen’s first trunk held only a
few changes of linen and a copy of Muir’s Book of Life. The
second bag held a hundred separately wrapped seedlings,
flash-dried and nestled in moist soil.

“Templars must plant at least a hundred offspring of the
Eternal Tree on whatever world they visit,” explained the
Consul. “The shoots rarely take, but it’s a ritual.”

Brawne Lamia moved toward the large metal box which
had sat at the bottom of the pile.

“Don’t touch that!” snapped the Consul.

“Why not?”

“It’s a Mobius cube,” responded Colonel Kassad for the
Consul. “A carbon-carbon-shell set around a zero impedance
containment field folded back on itself.”

“So?” said Lamia. “Mobius cubes seal artifacts and stuff in.
They don’t explode or anything.”

“No,” agreed the Consul, “but what they contain may
explode. May already have exploded, for that matter.”

“A cube that size could hold a kiloton nuclear explosion in
check as long as it was boxed during the nanosecond of
ignition,” added Fedmahn Kassad.

Lamia scowled at the trunk. “Then how do we know that
something in there didn’t kill Masteen?”

Kassad pointed to a faintly glowing green strip along the
trunk’s only seam. “It’s sealed. Once unsealed, a Mobius
cube has to be reactivated at a place where containment
fields can be generated. Whatever’s in there didn’t harm
Captain Masteen.”

“So there’s no way to tell?” mused Lamia.

“| have a good guess,” said the Consul.

The others looked at him. Rachel began to cry and Sol
pulled a heating strip on a nursing pak.

“Remember,” said the Consul, “at Edge yesterday when M.
Masteen made a big deal out of the cube? He talked about it
as if it were a secret weapon?”

“A weapon?” said Lamia.

“Of course!” Kassad said suddenly. “An erg!”

“Erg?” Martin Silenus stared at the small crate. “I thought
ergs were those forcefield critters that Templars use on their
treeships.”

“They are,” said the Consul. “The things were found about
three centuries ago living on asteroids around Aldebaran.
Bodies about as big as a cat’s spine, mostly a piezoelectric
nervous system sheathed in silicon gristle, but they feed
on ... and manipulate ... force-fields as large as those
generated by small spinships.”

“So how do you get all that into such a little box?” asked
Silenus, staring at the Mobius cube. “Mirrors?”

“In a sense,” said Kassad. “The things field would be
damped ... neither starving nor feeding. Rather like
cryogenic fugue for us. Plus this must be a small one. A cub,
so to speak.”

Lamia ran her hand along the metal sheath. “Templars
control these things? Communicate with them?”

“Yes,” said Kassad. “No one is quite sure how. It’s one of
the Brotherhood secrets. But Het Masteen must have been
confident that the erg would help him with ...”

“The Shrike,” finished Martin Silenus. “The Templar
thought that this energy imp would be his secret weapon
when he faced the Lord of Pain.” The poet laughed.

Father Hoyt cleared his throat. “The Church has accepted
the Hegemony’s ruling that ... these creatures ... ergs ... are
not sentient beings ... and thus not candidates for
Salvation.”

“Oh, they’re sentient, all right, Father,” said the Consul.
“They perceive things far better than we could ever imagine.
But if you mean intelligent ... self-aware ... then you're
dealing with something along the lines of a smart
grasshopper. Are grasshoppers candidates for salvation?”

Hoyt said nothing. Brawne Lamia said, “Well, evidently
Captain Masteen thought this thing was going to be his
Salvation. Something went wrong.” She looked around at the
bloodstained bulkheads and at the drying stains on the
deck. “Let’s get out of here.”

The windwagon tacked into increasingly strong winds as
the storm approached from the northeast. Ragged banners
of clouds raced white beneath the low, gray ceiling of
stormfront. Grasses whipped and bent under gusts of cold
wind. Ripples of lightning illuminated the horizon and were
followed by rolls of thunder sounding like warning shots
across the windwagon’s bow. The pilgrims watched in
silence until the first icy raindrops drove them below to the
large stateroom in the stern.

“This was in his robe pocket,” said Brawne Lamia, holding
up a slip of paper with the number 5 on it.

“So Masteen would have told his story next,” muttered the
Consul.

Martin Silenus tilted his chair until his back touched the
tall windows. Storm light made his satyr’s features appear
Slightly demonic. “There’s another possibility,” he said.

“Perhaps someone who hasn’t spoken yet had the fifth spot
and killed the Templar to trade places.”

Lamia stared at the poet. “That would have to be the
Consul or me,” she said, her voice flat.

Silenus shrugged.

Brawne Lamia pulled another piece of paper from her
tunic. “I have number 6. What would | have achieved? | go
next anyway.”

“Then perhaps it’s what Masteen would have said that
needed to be silenced,” said the poet. He shrugged again.
“Personally, | think the Shrike has begun harvesting us. Why
did we think we'd be allowed to get to the Tombs when the
thing’s been slaughtering people halfway from here to
Keats?”

“This is different,” said Sol Weintraub. “This is the Shrike
Pilgrimage.”

“So?”

In the silence that followed, the Consul walked to the
windows. Wind-driven torrents of rain obscured the Sea and
rattled the leaded panes. The wagon creaked and leaned
heavily to starboard as it began another leg of its tack.

“M. Lamia,” asked Colonel Kassad, “do you want to tell
your story now?”

Lamia folded her arms and looked at the rain-streaked
glass. “No. Let’s wait until we get off this damned ship. It
stinks of death.”

The windwagon reached the port of Pilgrims’ Rest in
midafternoon but the storm and tired light made it feel like
late evening to the weary passengers. The Consul had
expected representatives from the Shrike Temple to meet
them here at the beginning of the penultimate stage of their
journey but Pilgrims’ Rest appeared to the Consul to be as
empty as Edge had been.

The approach to the foothills and the first sight of the
Bridle Range was as exciting as any landfall and brought all
six of the would-be pilgrims on deck despite the cold rain
which continued to fall. The foothills were sere and
sensuous, their brown curves and sudden upthrustings
contrasting strongly with the verdant monochrome of the
Sea of Crass. The nine-thousand-meter peaks beyond were
only hinted at by gray and white planes soon intersected by
low clouds, but even so truncated were powerful to behold.
The snow line came down to a point just above the
collection of burned-out hovels and cheap hotels which had
been Pilgrims’ Rest.

“If they destroyed the tramway, we're finished,” muttered
the Consul. The thought of it, forbidden until now, made his
stomach turn over.

“| see the first five towers,” said Colonel Kassad, using his
powered glasses. “They seem intact.”

“Any sign of a car?”

“No ... wait, yes. There’s one in the gate at the station
platform.”

“Any moving?” asked Martin Silenus, who obviously
understood how desperate their situation would be if the
tramway was not intact.

“No.”

The Consul shook his head. Even in the worst weather with
no passengers, the cars had been kept moving to keep the
great cables flexed and free of ice.

The six of them had their luggage on deck even before the
wind-wagon reefed its sails and extended a gangplank. Each
now wore a heavy coat against the elements—Kassad in
FORCE-issue thermouflage cape, Brawne Lamia in a long
garment called a trenchcoat for reasons long forgotten,
Martin Silenus in thick furs which rippled now sable, now
gray with the vagaries of wind, Father Hoyt in long black
which made him more of a scarecrow figure than ever, Sol
Weintraub in a thick goosedown jacket which covered him

and the child, and the Consul in the thinning but serviceable
greatcoat his wife had given him some decades before.

“What about Captain Masteen’s things?” asked Sol as they
stood at the head of the gangplank. Kassad had gone ahead
to reconnoiter the village.

“| brought them up,” said Lamia. “We'll take them with
us.
“It doesn’t seem right somehow,” said Father Hoyt. “Just
going on, | mean. There should be some ... service. Some
recognition that a man has died.”

“May have died,” reminded Lamia, easily lifting a forty-kilo
backpack with one hand.

Hoyt looked incredulous. “Do you really believe that M.
Masteen might be alive?”

“No,” said Lamia. Snowflakes settled on her black hair.

Kassad waved to them from the end of the dock and they
carried their luggage off the silent windwagon. No one
looked back.

“Empty?” called Lamia as they approached the Colonel.
The tall man’s cloak was still fading from its gray and black
chameleon mode.

“Empty.”

“Bodies?”

“No,” said Kassad. He turned toward Sol and the Consul.
“Did you get the things from the galley?”

Both men nodded.

“What things?” asked Silenus.

“A week’s worth of food,” said Kassad, turning to look up
the hill toward the tramway station. For the first time the
Consul noticed the long assault weapon in the crook of the
Colonel’s arm, barely visible under the cloak. “We’re not sure
if there are any provisions beyond this point.”

Will we be alive a week from now? thought the Consul. He
said nothing.

They ferried the gear to the station in two trips. Wind
whistled through the open windows and shattered domes of

"m

r

the dark buildings. On the second trip, the Consul carried
one end of Masteen’s Mobius cube while Lenar Hoyt puffed
and panted under the other end.

“Why are we taking the erg thing with us?” gasped Hoyt
as they reached the base of the metal stairway leading to
the station. Rust streaked and spotted the platform like
orange lichen.

“| don’t know,” said the Consul, gasping for breath himself.

From the terminal platform they could see far out over the
Sea of Crass. The windwagon sat where they had left it, sails
reefed, a dark and lifeless thing. Snow squalls moved across
the prairie and gave the illusion of whitecaps on the
numberless stalks of high grass.

“Get the material aboard,” called Kassad. “I’ll see if the
running gear can be reset from the operator’s cabin up
there.”

“Isn’t it automatic?” asked Martin Silenus, his small head
almost lost in thick furs. “Like the windwagon?”

“| don’t think so,” said Kassad. “Go on, l'Il see if | can get it
started up.”

“What if it leaves without you?” called Lamia at the
Colonel’s retreating back.

“It won't.”

The interior of the tramcar was cold and bare except for
metal benches in the forward compartment and a dozen
rough bunks in the smaller, rear area. The car was big—at
least eight meters long by five wide. The rear compartment
was partitioned from the front cabin by a thin metal
bulkhead with an opening but no door. A small commode
took up a closet-sized corner of this, aft compartment.
Windows rising from waist height to the roofline lined the
forward compartment.

The pilgrims heaped their luggage in the center of the
wide floor and stomped around, waved their arms, or

otherwise worked to stay warm. Martin Silenus lay full length
on one of the benches, with only his feet and the top of his
head emerging from fur. “I forgot,” he said, “how the fuck do
you turn on the heat in this thing?”

The Consul glanced at the dark lighting panels. “It’s
electrical. It’ll come on when the Colonel gets us moving.”

“Ifthe Colonel gets us moving,” said Silenus.

Sol Weintraub had changed Rachel’s diaper. Now he
bundled her up again in an infant’s thermsuit and rocked
her in his arms. “Obviously I’ve never been here before,” he
said. “Both of you gentlemen have?”

“Yeah,” said the poet.

“No,” said the Consul. “But lve seen pictures of the
tramway.”

“Kassad said he returned to Keats once this way,’
Brawne Lamia from the other room.

“I think ...” began Sol Weintraub and was interrupted by a
great grinding of gears and a wild lurch as the long car
rockcd sickeningly and then swung forward under the
suddenly moving cable. Everyone rushed to the window on
the platform side.

Kassad had thrown his gear aboard before climbing the
long ladder to the operator’s cabin. Now he appeared in the
cabin’s doorway, slid down the long ladder, and ran toward
the car. The car was already passing beyond the loading
area of the platform.

“He isn’t going to make it,” whispered Father Hoyt.

Kassad sprinted the last ten meters with legs that looked
impossibly long, a cartoon stick figure of a man.

The tramcar slid out of the loading notch, swung free of
the station. Space opened between the car and the station.
It was eight meters to the rocks below. The platform deck
was streaked with ice. Kassad ran full soeed ahead even as
the car pulled away.

“Come on!” screamed Brawne Lamia. The others picked up
the cry.

r

called

The Consul looked up at sheaths of ice cracking and
dropping away from the cable as the tramcar moved up and
forward. He looked back. There was too much space. Kassad
could never make it.

Fedmahn Kassad was moving at an incredible speed when
he reached the edge of the platform. The Consul was
reminded for the second time of the Old Earth jaguar he had
seen in a Lusus zoo. He half expected to see the Colonels
feet slip on a patch of ice, the long legs flying out horizontal,
the man falling silently to the snowy boulders below.
Instead, Kassad seemed to fly for an endless moment, long
arms extended, cape flying out behind. He disappeared
behind the car.

There came a thud, followed by a long minute when no
one spoke or moved. They were forty meters high now,
climbing toward the first tower. A second later Kassad
became visible at the corner of the car, pulling himself along
a series of icy niches and handholds in the metal. Brawne
Lamia flung open the cabin door. Ten hands helped pull
Kassad inside.

“Thank God,” said Father Hoyt.

The Colonel took a deep breath and smiled grimly. “There
was a dead man’s brake, | had to rig the lever with a
sandbag. | didn’t want to bring the ear back for a second
try.”

Martin Silenus pointed to the rapidly approaching support
tower and the ceiling of clouds just beyond. The cable
stretched upward into oblivion. “I| guess we’re crossing the
mountains now whether v’e want to or not.”

“How long to make the crossing?” asked Hoyt.

“Twelve hours. A little less perhaps. Sometimes the
operators would stop the cars if the wind rose too high or the
ice got too bad.”

“We won't be stopping on this trip,” said Kassad.

“Unless the cable’s breached somewhere,” said the poet.
“Or we hit a snag.”

“Shut up,” said Lamia. “Who’s interested in heating some
dinner?”

“Look,” said the Consul.

They moved to the forward windows. The tram rose a
hundred meters above the last brown curve of foothills.
Kilometers below and behind they caught a final glimpse of
the station, the haunted hovels of Pilgrims’ Rest, and the
motionless windwagon.

Then snow and thick cloud enveloped them.

° d ka

The tramcar had no real cooking facilities but the aft
bulkhead offered a cold box and a microwave for reheating.
Lamia and Weintraub combined various meats and
vegetables from the windwagon’s galley to produce a
passable stew. Martin Silenus had brought along wine
bottles from both the Benares and the windwagon and he
chose a Hyperion burgundy to go with the stew.

They were nearly finished with their dinner when the
gloom pressing against the windows lightened and then
lifted altogether. The Consul turned on his bench to see the
sun suddenly reappear, filling the tramcar with a
transcendent golden light.

There was a collective sigh from the group. It had seemed
that darkness had fallen hours before, but now, as they rose
above a sea of clouds from which rose an island chain of
mountains, they were treated to a brilliant sunset.
Hyperion’s sky had deepened from its daytime glaucous
glare to the bottomless lapis lazuli of evening while a red-
gold sun ignited cloud towers and great summits of ice and
rock. The Consul looked around. His fellow pilgrims, who had
seemed gray and small in the dim light of half a minute
earlier, now glowed in the gold of sunset.

Martin Silenus raised his glass. “That’s better, by God.”

The Consul looked up at their line of travel, the massive
cable dwindling to threadlike thinness far ahead and then to

nothing at all. On a summit several kilometers beyond, gold
light glinted on the next support tower.

“One hundred and ninety-two pylons,” said Silenus in a
singsong tour guide’s bored tones. “Each pylon is
constructed of duralloy and whiskered carbon and stands
eighty-three meters high.”

“We must be high,” said Brawne Lamia in a low voice.

“The high point of the ninety-six-kilometer tramcar voyage
lies above the summit of Mount Dryden, the fifth highest
peak in the Bridle Range, at nine thousand two hundred
forty-six meters,” droned on Martin Silenus.

Colonel Kassad looked around. “The cabin’s pressurized. |
felt the change-over some time ago.”

“Look,” said Brawne Lamia.

The sun had been resting on the horizon line of clouds for
a long moment. Now it dipped below, seemingly igniting the
depths of storm cloud from beneath and casting a panoply
of colors along the entire western edge of the world. Snow
cornices and glaze ice still glowed along the western side of
the peaks, which rose a kilometer or more above the rising
tramcar. A few brighter stars appeared in the deepening
dome of sky.

The Consul turned to Brawne Lamia. “Why don’t you tell
your story now, M. Lamia? Well want to sleep later, before
arriving at the Keep.”

Lamia sipped the last of her wine. “Does everyone want to
hear it now?”

Heads nodded in the roseate twilight. Martin Silenus
shrugged.

“All right,” said Brawne Lamia. She set down her empty
glass, pulled her feet up on the bench so that her elbows
rested on her knees, and began her tale.

THE DETECTIVE’S TALE:
THE LONG GOOD-BYE

Ì knew the case was going to be special the minute that he

walked into my office. He was beautiful. By that | don’t
mean effeminate or “pretty” in the male-model, HTV-star
mode, merely ... beautiful.

He was a short man, no taller than |, and | was born and
raised in Lusus’s 1.3-g field. It was apparent in a second that
my visitor was not from Lusus—his compact form was well
proportioned by Web standards, athletic but thin. His face
was a study in purposeful energy: low brow, sharp
cheekbones, compact nose, solid jaw, and a wide mouth that
suggested both a sensuous side and a stubborn streak. His
eyes were large and hazel-colored. He looked to be in his
late twenties standard.

Understand, | didn’t itemize all this the moment he walked
in. My first thought was, /s this a client? My second thought
was, Shit, this guy’s beautiful.

“M. Lamia?”

“Yeah.”

“M. Brawne Lamia of AllWeb Investigations?”

“Yeah.”

He looked around as if he didn’t quite believe it. |
understood the look. My office is on the twenty-third level of
an old industrial hive in the Old Digs section of Iron Pig on
Lusus. | have three big windows that look out on Service
Trench 9 where it’s always dark and always drizzling thanks
to a massive filter drip from the Hive above. The view is
mostly of abandoned automated loading docks and rusted
girders.

What the hell, it’s cheap. And most of my clients call
rather than show up in person.

“May | sit down?” he asked, evidently satisfied that a bona
fide investigatory agency would operate out of such a slum.

“Sure,” | said and waved him to a chair. “M.... ah?”

“Johnny,” he said.

He didn’t look like a first-name type to me. Something
about him breathed money. It wasn’t his clothes—common
enough casuals in black and gray, although the fabric was
better than average—it was just a sense that the guy had
class. There was something about his accent. I’m good at
placing dialects—it helps in this profession—but | couldn’t
place this guy’s homeworld, much less local region.

“How can | help you, Johnny?” | held out the bottle of
Scotch | had been ready to put away just as he entered.

Johnny-boy shook his head. Maybe he thought | wanted
him to drink from the bottle. Hell, | have more class than
that. There are paper cups over by the water cooler. “M.
Lamia,” he said, the cultivated accent still bugging me by its
elusiveness, “I need an investigator.”

“That’s what | do.”

He paused. Shy. A lot of my clients are hesitant to tell me
what the job is. No wonder, since ninety-five percent of my
work is divorce and domestic stuff. | waited him out.

“It’s a somewhat sensitive matter,” he said at last.

“Yeah, M.... ah, Johnny, most of my work falls under that
category. I’m bonded with UniWeb and everything having to
do with a client falls under the Privacy Protection Act.
Everything is confidential, even the fact that we're talking
now. Even if you decide not to hire me.” That was basic
bullshit since the authorities could get at my files in a
moment if they ever wanted to, but | sensed that | had to
put this guy at ease somehow. God, he was beautiful.

“Uh-huh,” he said and glanced around again. He leaned
forward. “M. Lamia, | would want you to investigate a
murder.”

This got my attention. I’d been reclining with my feet on
the desk; now | sat up and leaned forward. “A murder? Are
you sure? What about the cops?”

“They aren’t involved.”

“That’s not possible,” | said with the sinking feeling that |
was dealing with a loony rather than a client. “It’s a crime to
conceal a murder from the authorities.” What | thought was:
Are you the murderer, Johnny?

He smiled and shook his head. “Not in this case.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, M. Lamia, that a murder was committed but that
the police—local and Hegemony—have neither knowledge
of it nor jurisdiction over it.”

“Not possible,” | said again. Outside, sparks from an
industrial welder’s torch cascaded into the trench along with
the rusty drizzle. “Explain.”

“A murder was committed outside of the Web. Outside of
the Protectorate. There were no local authorities.”

That made sense. Sort of. For the life of me, though, |
couldn’t figure where he was talking about. Even the
Outback settlements and colonial worlds have cops. On
board some sort of spaceship? Uh-uh. The Interstellar Transit
Authority has jurisdiction there.

“| see,” | said. It'd been some weeks since I’d had a case.
“All right, tell me the details.”

“And the conversation will be confidential even if you do
not take the case?”

“Absolutely.”

“And if you do take the case, you will report only to me?”

“Of course.”

My prospective client hesitated, rubbing his fingers
against his chin. His hands were exquisite. “All right,” he
said at last.

“Start at the beginning,” | said. “Who was murdered?”

Johnny sat up straight, an attentive schoolboy. There was
no doubting his sincerity. He said, “I was.”

It took ten minutes to get the story out of him. When he
was finished, | no longer thought he was crazy. | was. Or |

would be if | took the job.

Johnny—his real name was a code of digits, letters, and
cipher bands longer than my arm—was a cybrid.

I'd heard about cybrids. Who hasn’t? | once accused my
first husband of being one. But | never expected to be sitting
in the same room with one. Or to find it so damned
attractive.

Johnny was an Al. His consciousness or ego or whatever
you want to call it floated somewhere in the
megadatasphere dataumplane of the TechnoCore. Like
everyone else except maybe the current Senate CEO or the
Als’ garbage removers, | had no idea where the TechnoCore
was. The Als had peacefully seceded from human control
more than three centuries ago—before my time—and while
they continued to serve the Hegemony as allies by advising
the All Thing, monitoring the dataspheres, occasionally
using their predictive abilities to help us avoid major
mistakes or natural disasters, the TechnoCore generally went
about its own indecipherable and distinctly nonhuman
business in privacy.

Fair enough, it seemed to me.

Usually Als do business with humans and human
machines via the datasphere. They can manufacture an
interactive holo if they need to—l remember during the
Maui-Covenant incorporation, the TechnoCore ambassadors
at the treaty signing looked suspiciously like the old holo
star Tyrone Bathwaite.

Cybrids are a whole different matter. Tailored from human
genetic stock, they are far more human in appearance and
outward behavior than androids are allowed to be.
Agreements between the TechnoCore and the Hegemony
allow only a handful of cybrids to be in existence.

| looked at Johnny. From an Al’s perspective, the beautiful
body and intriguing personality sitting across the desk from
me must be merely another appendage, a remote, somewhat

more complex but otherwise no more important than any
one of ten thousand such sensors, manipulators,
autonomous units, or other remotes that an Al might use in a
day’s work. Discarding “Johnny” probably would create no
more concern in an Al than clipping a fingernail would
bother me.

What a waste, | thought.

“A cybrid,” | said.

“Yes. Licensed. | have a Worldweb users visa.”

“Good,” | heard myself say. “And someone ... murdered
your cybrid and you want me to find out who?”

“No,” said the young man. He had brownish-red curls. Like
his accent, the hairstyle eluded me. It seemed archaic
somehow, but | had seen it somewhere. “It was not merely
this body that was murdered. My assailant murdered me.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

“You as inthe... ah... Al itself?”

“Precisely.”

| didn’t get it. Als can’t die. Not as far as anyone in the
Web knew. “I don’t get it,” | said.

Johnny nodded, “Unlike a human personality which
can ... | believe the consensus is ... be destroyed at death,
my own consciousness cannot be terminated. There was,
however, as a result of the assault, an ... interruption.
Although | possessed ... ah... shall we say duplicate
recordings of memories, personality, et cetera, there was a
loss. Some data were destroyed in the attack. In that sense,
the assailant committed murder.”

“| see,” | lied. | took a breath. “What about the Al
authorities ... if there are such things ... or the Hegemony
cybercops? Wouldn’t they be the ones to go to?”

“For personal reasons,” said the attractive young man
whom | was trying to see as a cybrid, “it is important—even
necessary—that | do not consult these sources.”

| raised an eyebrow. This sounded more like one of my
regular clients.

“I assure you,” he said, “it is nothing illegal. Nor unethical.
Merely ... embarrassing to me on a level which | cannot
explain.”

| folded my arms across my chest. “Look, Johnny. This is a
pretty half-assed story. | mean, | only have your word that
you’re a cybrid. You might be a scam artist for all | know.”

He looked surprised. “I had not thought of that. How would
you like me to show you that | am what I say | am?”

| did not hesitate a second. “Transfer a million marks to my
checking account in TransWeb,” | said.

Johnny smiled. At the same instant my phone rang and the
image of a harried man with the TransWeb code block
floating behind him said, “Excuse me, M. Lamia, but we
wondered with a... ah ... deposit of this size if you would be
interested in investigating our long-term savings options or
our mutual assured market possibilities?”

“Later,” | said.

The bank manager nodded and vanished.

“That could’ve been a simulation,” | said.

Johnny’s smile was pleasant. “Yes, but even that would be
a satisfactory demonstration, would it not?”

“Not necessarily.”

He shrugged. “Assuming | am what | say | am, will you take
the case?”

“Yeah.” | sigheld. “One thing though. My fee isn’t a million
marks. | get five hundred a day plus expenses.”

The cybrid nodded. “Does that mean you will take the
case?”

| stood up, put on my hat, and pulled an old coat from a
rack by the window. | bent over the lower desk drawer,
smoothly sliding my father’s pistol into a coat pocket. “Let’s
go,” | said.

“Yes,” said Johnny. “Go where?”

“| want to see where you were murdered.”

Stereotype has it that someone born on Lusus hates to
leave the Hive and suffers from instant agoraphobia if we
visit anything more open to the elements than a shopping
mall. The truth of it is, most of my business comes from ...,
and leads to ... offworld. Skip-tracing deadbeats who use the
farcaster system and a change of identity to try to start over.
Finding philandering spouses who think rendezvousing on a
different planet will keep them safe from discovery. Tracking
down missing kids and absent parents.

Still, | was surprised to the point of hesitating a second
when we stepped through the Iron Pig Concourse farcaster
onto an empty stone plateau which seemed to stretch to
infinity. Except for the bronze rectangle of the farcaster
portal behind us, there was no sign of civilization anywhere.
The air smelled like rotten eggs; The sky was a yellow-brown
cauldron of sick-looking clouds. The ground around us was
gray and scaled and held no visible life, not even lichen. |
had no idea how far away the horizon really was, but we felt
high and it looked far, and there was no hint of trees, shrubs,
or animal life in the distance either.

“Where the hell are we?” | asked. | had been sure that |
knew all of the worlds in the Web.

“Madhya,” said Johnny, pronouncing it something like
“Mudye.”

“I never heard of it,” | said, putting one hand in my pocket
and finding the pearl-handled grip of Dad’s automatic.

“It’s not officially in the Web yet,” said the cybrid.
“Officially, it’s a colony of Parvati. But it’s only light-minutes
from the FORCE base there and the farcaster connections
have been set up before Madhya joins the Protectorate.”

| looked at the desolation. The sulphur-dioxide stench was
making me ill and | was afraid it was going to ruin my suit.
“Colonies? Nearby?”

“No. There are several small cities on the other side of the
planet.”

“What’s the nearest inhabited area?”

“Nanda Devi. A town of about three hundred people. It’s
more than two thousand kilometers to the south.”

“Then why put a farcaster portal here?”

“Potential mining sites,” said Johnny. He gestured toward
the gray plateau. “Heavy metals. The consortium authorized
over a hundred farcaster portals in this hemisphere for easy
access once the development began.”

“Okay,” | said. “It’s a good place for a murder. Why’d you
come here?”

“| don’t know. It was part of the memory section lost.”

“Who'd you come with?”

“| don’t know that either.”

“What do you know?”

The young man put his graceful hands in his pockets.
“Whoever ... whatever ... attacked me used a type of
weapon known in the Core as an AIDS II virus.”

“What’s that?”

“AIDS Il was a human plague disease back long before the
Hegira,” said Johnny. “It disabled the immune system.
This ... virus ... works the same with an Al. In less than a
second it infiltrates security systems and turns lethal
phagocyte programs against the host ... against the Al itself.
Against me.”

“So you couldn't have contracted this virus naturally?”

Johnny smiled. “Impossible. It’s comparable to asking a
shooting victim if he might not have fallen on the bullets.”

| shrugged. “Look, if you want a datumnet or Al expert,
you’ve come to the wrong woman. Other than accessing the
sphere like twenty billion other chumps, | know zilch about
the ghost world.” | used the old term to see if it would get a
rise out of him.

“| know,” said Johnny, still equable. “That’s not what |
want you to do.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Find out who brought me here and killed me. And why.”

“All right. Why do you think this is where the murder took
place?”

“Because this is where | regained control of my cybrid
when I was ... reconstituted.”

“You mean your cybrid was incapacitated while the virus
destroyed you?”

“Yes.”

“And how long did that last?”

“My death? Almost a minute before my reserve persona
could be activated.”

| laughed. | couldn’t help myself.

“What is amusing, M. Lamia?”

“Your concept of death,” | said.

The hazel eyes looked sad. “Perhaps it is amusing to you,
but you have no idea what a minute
of ... disconnection ... means to an element of the
TechnoCore. It is eons of time and information. Millennia of
noncommunication.”

“Yeah,” | said, able to hold back my own tears without too
much effort. “So what did your body, your cybrid do while
you were changing personae tapes or whatever?”

“| presume it was comatose.”

“It can’t handle itself autonomously?”

“Oh, yes, but not when there’s a general systems failure.”

“So where did you come to?”

“Pardon me?”

“When you reactivated the cybrid, where was it?”

Johnny nodded in understanding. He pointed to a boulder
less than five meters from the farcaster. “Lying there.”

“On this side or the other side?”

“The other side.”

| went over and examined the spot. No blood. No notes. No
murder weapons left lying about. Not even a footprint or
indication that Johnny’s body had lain there for that eternity
of a minute. A police forensics team might have read

volumes into the microscopic and biotic clues left there, but
all | could see was hard rock.

“If your memory’s really gone,” | said, “how do you know
someone else came here with you?”

“I accessed the farcaster records.”

“Did you bother to check the mystery person or person’s
name on the universal card charge?”

“We both farcast on my card,” said Johnny.

“Just one other person?”

“Yes.”

| nodded. Farcaster records would solve every interworld
crime if the portals were true teleportation; the transport
data record could have recreated the subject down to the
last gram and follicle. Instead, a farcaster essentially is just a
crude hole ripped in space/time by a phased singularity. If
the farcaster criminal doesn’t use his or her own card, the
only data we get are origination and destination.

“Where'd you two farcast from?” | asked.

“Tau Ceti Center.”

“You have the portal code?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s go there and finish this conversation,” | said. “This
place stinks to high heaven.”

TC2, the age-old nickname for Tau Ceti Center, is certainly
the most crowded world in the Web. Besides its population
of five billion people scrabbling for room on less than half
the land area of Old Earth, it has an orbital ring ecology that
is home for half a billion more. In addition to being the
capital of the Hegemony and home of the Senate, TC2 is the
business nexus for Webtrade. Naturally the portal number
Johnny had found brought us to a_six-hundred-portal
terminex in one of the biggest spires in New London, one of
the oldest and largest city sections.

“Hell,” | said, “let’s get a drink.”

There was a choice of bars near the terminex and | picked
one that was relatively quiet: a simulated ship’s tavern,
dark, cool, with plenty of fake wood and brass. | ordered a
beer. | never drink the hard stuff or use Flashback when ona
case. Sometimes | think that need for self-discipline is what
keeps me in the business.

Johnny also ordered a beer, a dark, German brew bottled
on Renaissance Vector. | found myself wondering what vices
a cybrid might have. | said:

“What else did you find out before coming to see me?”

The young man opened his hands. “Nothing.”

“Shit,” | said reverently. “This is a joke. With all the powers
of an Al at your disposal, you can’t trace your cybrid’s
whereabouts and actions for a few days prior to
your ... accident?”

“No.” Johnny sipped his beer. “Rather, | could but there are
important reaons why I do not want my fellow Als to find me
investigating.”

“You suspect one of them?”

Instead of answering, Johnny handed me a flimsy of his
universal card purchases. “The blackout caused by my
murder left five standard days unaccounted for. Here are the
card charges for that time.”

“I thought you said you were only disconnected for a
minute.”

Johnny scratched his cheek with one finger. “I was lucky to
lose only five days’ worth of data,” he said.

| waved over the human waiter and ordered another beer.
“Look,” | said, “Johnny ... whoever you are, l'Il never be able
to get an angle on this case unless | know more about you
and your situation. Why would someone want to kill you if
they know you'll be reconstituted or whatever the hell it is?”

“| see two possible motives,” said Johnny over his beer.

| nodded. “One would be to create just the memory loss
they succeeded in getting,” | said. “That would suggest that,
whatever it was they wanted you to forget, it’d occurred or

come to your attention in the past week or so. What’s the
second motive?”

“To send me a message,” said Johnny. “I just don’t know
what it is. Or from who.”

“Do you know who would want to kill you?”

“No.”

“No guesses at all?”

“None.”

“Most murders,” | said, “are acts of sudden, mindless rage
committed by someone the victim knows well. Family. A
friend or lover. A majority of the premeditated ones are
usually carried out by someone close to the victim.”

Johnny said nothing. There was something about his face
that | found incredibly attractive—a sort of masculine
strength combined with a feminine sense of awareness.
Perhaps it was the eyes.

“Do Als have families?” | asked. “Feuds? Squabbles?
Lovers’ spats?”

“No.” He smiled slightly. “There are quasi-family
arrangements, but they share none of the requirements of
emotion or responsibility that human families exhibit. Al
‘families’ are primarily convenient code groups for showing
where certain processing trends originated.”

“So you don’t think another Al attacked you?”

“It’s possible.” Johnny rotated his glass in his hands. “I just
do not see why they would attack me through my cybrid.”

“Easier access?”

“Perhaps. But it complicates things for the assailant. An
attack in datumplane would have been infinitely more
lethal. Also, | do fail to see any motive for another Al. It
makes no sense. I’m a threat to no one.”

“Why do you have a cybrid, Johnny? Maybe if | understand
your role in things, | could get at a motive.”

He pickcd up a pretzel and played with it. “I have a
cybrid ... in some ways | am a cybrid, because

my ... function ... is to observe and react to human beings.
In a sense, | was human once myself.”

| frowned and shook my head. So far nothing he’d said had
made sense.

“You've heard of personality retrieval projects?” he asked.

“No.”

“A standard year ago, when the FORCE sims recreated the
personality of General Horace Glennon-Height to see what
made him such a brilliant general? It was in ail the news.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, | am ... or was ... an earlier and much more
complicated retrieval project. My core persona was based on
a pre-Hegira Old Earth poet. Ancient. Born late eighteenth
century Old Calendar.”

“How the hell can they reconstruct a personality that lost
in time?”

“Writings,” said Johnny. “His letters. Diaries. Critical
biographies. Testimony of friends. But mostly through his
verse. The sim recreates the environment, plugs in the
known factors, and works backward from the creative
products. Voila—a persona core. Crude at first but, by the
time | came into being, relatively refined. Our first attempt
was a twentieth-century poet named Ezra Pound. Our
persona was opinionated to the point of absurdity,
prejudiced beyond rationality, and functionally insane. It
took a year of tinkering before we discovered that the
persona was accurate; it was the man who had been nuts. A
genius but nuts.”

“And then what?” | said. “They build your personality
around a dead poet. Then what?”

“This becomes the template upon which the Al is grown,”
said Johnny. “The cybrid allows me to carry out my role in
the datumplane community.”

“AS poet?”

Johnny smied again. “More as poem,” he said.

“A poem?”

“An ongoing work of art ... but not in the human sense. A
puzzle perhaps. A variable enigma which occasionally offers
unusual insights into more serious lines of analysis.”

“| don’t get it,” | said.

“It probably does not matter. | very much doubt if
my ... purpose ... was the cause of the assault.”

“What do you think was the cause?”

“| have no idea.”

| felt us closing a circle. “All right,” | said. “lIl try to find
out what you were doing and who you were with during
these lost five days. Is there anything besides the credit
flimsy that you can think of to help?”

Johnny shook his head. “You know, of course, why it is
important for me to know the identity and motive of my
assailant?”

“Sure,” | said, “they might try it again.”

“Precisely.”

“How can | get hold of you if | need to?”

Johnny passed me an access chip.

“A secure line?” | said.

“Very.”

“Okay,” | said, “l'Il get back to you if and when | get some
information.”

We moved out of the bar and toward the terminex. He was
moving away when I took three quick steps and grabbed his
arm. It was the first time that | had touched him. “Johnny.
What’s the name of the Old Earth poet they resurrected ...”

“Retrieved.”

“Whatever. The one they built your Al persona on?”

The attractive cybrid hesitated. | noticed that his
eyelashes were very long. “How can it be important?” he
asked.

“Who knows what’s important?”

He nodded. “Keats,” he said. “Born in av. 1795. Died of
tuberculosis in 1821. John Keats.”

Following someone through a series of farcaster changes is
damn near impossible. Especially if you want to remain
undetected. The Web cops can do it, given about fifty agents
assigned to the task, plus some exotic and damned
expensive high-tech toys, not to mention the cooperation of
the Transit Authority. For a solo, the task is almost
impossible.

Still, it was fairly important for me to see where my new
client was headed.

Johnny did not look back as he crossed the terminex plaza.
| moved to a nearby kiosk and watched through my pocket-
sized imager as he punched codes on a manual diskey,
inserted his card, and stepped through the glowing
rectangle.

The use of the manual diskey probably meant that he was
headed for a general access portal since private ‘caster
codes are usually imprinted on eyes-only chips. Great. I'd
narrowed his destination down to approximately two million
portals on a hundred and fifty-some Web worlds and half
that many moons.

With one hand | pulled the red “lining” out of my overcoat
while | hit replay on the imager, watching through the
eyepiece as it magnified the diskey sequence. | tugged out a
red cap to go with my new red jacket and pulled the brim
low over my face. Moving quickly across the plaza, | queried
my comlog about the nine-digit transfer code I’d seen on the
imager. | knew the first three digits meant the world of
Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna—l’d memorized all the planetary
prefixes—and was told an instant later that the portal code
led to a residential district in the First Expansion city of
Wansiehn.

| hurried to the first open booth and ‘cast there, stepping
out onto a small terminex plaza paved in worn brick. Ancient
oriental shops leaned against one another, eaves of their
pagoda roofs hanging over narrow side streets. People

thronged the plaza and stood in doorways and, while most of
those in sight were obviously descendants of the Long Flight
exiles who settled THP, many were offworlders. The air
smelled of alien vegetation, sewage, and cooking rice.

“Damn,” | whispered. There were three other farcaster
portals there and none were in constant use. Johnny could
have farcast out immediately.

Instead of ‘casting back to Lusus, | spent a few minutes
checking the plaza and side streets. By this time the
melanin pill I'd swallowed had worked and | was a young
black woman—or man, it was hard to tell in my trendy red
balloon jacket and polarized visor, strolling idly while taking
pictures with my tourist imager.

The trace pellet I’d dissolved in Johnny’s second German
beer had had more than enough time to work. The UV-
positive microspores were almost hanging in the air by now
—I| could almost follow the trail of exhalations he had left.
Instead, | found a bright yellow handprint on a dark wall
(bright yellow to my especially fitted visor of course,
invisible out of the UV spectrum) and then followed the trail
of vague blotches where saturated clothing had touched
market stalls or stone.

Johnny was eating in a Cantonese restaurant less than two
blocks from the terminex plaza. The frying food smelled
delicious but | restrained myself from entering—checking
prices in alley bookstalls and haggling in the market for
almost an hour before he finished, returned to the plaza, and
farcast out. This time he used a chip code—a private portal,
certainly, possibly a private home—and | took two chances
by using my pilot-fish card to follow him. Two chances
because first the card is totally illegal and would someday
cost me my license if caught—less than likely if | kept using
Daddy Silva’s obscenely expensive but aesthetically perfect
shapechanger chips—and, second, | ran a better than even
chance of ending up in the living room of Johnny’s
house ... never an easy situation to talk one’s way out of.

It was not his living room. Even before I’d located the
street signs | recognized the familiar extra tug of gravity, the
dim, bronze light, the scent of oil and ozone in the air, and
knew I was home on Lusus.

Johnny had 'cast into a medium-security private
residential tower in one of the Bergson Hives. Perhaps that
was why he’d chosen my agency—we were almost
neighbors, less than six hundred klicks apart.

My cybrid was not in sight. | walked purposefully so as not
to alert any security vids programmed to respond to
loitering. There was no residents’ directory, no numbers or
names on the apartment doorways, and no listings
accessible by comlog. | guessed that there were about
twenty thousand residential cubbies in East Bergson Hive.

The telltales were fading as the spore soup died, but |
checked only two of the radial corridors before | found a trail.
Johnny lived far out on a glass-floored wing about a methane
lake. His palmlock showed a faintly glowing handprint. |
used my cat-burglar tools to take a reading of the lock and
then | ’cast home.

All in all, I'd watched my man go out for Chinese food and
then go home for the night. Enough accomplished for one
day.

BB Surbringer was my Al expert. BB worked in Hegemony
Flow Control Records and Statistics and spent most of his life
reclining on a free-fall couch with half a dozen microleads
running from his skull while he communed with other
bureaucrats in datumplane. I’d known him in college when
he was a pure cyberpuke, a twentieth-generation hacker,
cortically shunted when he was twelve standard. His real
name was Ernest but he’d earned the nickname BB when he
went out with a friend of mine named Shayla Toyo. Shayla’d
seen him naked on their second date and had laughed for a
solid half hour: Ernest was—and is—almost two meters tall

but masses less than fifty kilos. Shayla said that he had a
butt like two BBs and—like most cruel things do—the
nickname stuck.

| visited him in one of the windowless worker monoliths on
TC2. No cloud towers for BB and his ilk.

“So, Brawne,” he said, “how come you're getting
information-literate in your old age? You’re too old to get a
real job.”

“| just want to know about Als, BB.”

“Only one of the most complex topics in the known
universe,” he sighed and looked longingly at his
disconnected neural shunt and = metacortex leads.
Cyberpukes never come down, but civil servants are
required to dismount for lunch. BB was like most cyberpukes
in that he never felt comfortable exchanging information
when he wasn’t riding a data wave. “So what do you want to
know?” he said.

“Why did the Als drop out?” | had to start somewhere.

BB made a convoluted gesture with his hands. “They said
they had projects which were not compatible with total
immersion in Hegemony—read human—affairs. Truth is,
nobody knows.”

“But they’re still around. Still managing things?”

“Sure. The system couldn’t run without them. You know
that, Brawne. Even the All Thing couldn’t work without Al
management of the real-time Swarzschild patterning ...”

“Okay,” said, cutting him off before he lapsed into
cyberpukese, “but what are their ‘other projects’?”

“No one knows. Branner and Swayze up at Artintel Corp
think that the Als are pursuing the evolution of
consciousness on a galactic scale. We know they have their
own probes out far deeper into the Outback than ...”

“What about cybrids?”

“Cybrids?” BB sat up and looked interested for the first
time, “Why do you mention cybrids?”

“Why are you surprised that | mentioned them, BB?”

He absently rubbed his shunt socket. “Well, first of all,
most people forget they exist. Two centuries ago it was all
alarmism and pod people taking over and all that, but now
nobody thinks about them. Also, | just ran across anomaly
advisory yesterday that said that cybrids were
disappearing.”

“Disappearing?” It was my turn to sit up.

“You know, being phased out. The Als used to maintain
about a thousand licensed cybrids in the Web. About half of
them based right here on TC2. Last week’s census showed
about two thirds of those’d been recalled in the past month
or so.”

“What happens when an Al recalls its cybrid?”

“| dunno. They're destroyed, | suppose. Als don’t like to
waste things, so | imagine the genetic material’s recycled
somehow.”

“Why are they being recycled?”

“Nobody knows, Brawne. But then most of us don’t know
why the Als do most of the things they do.”

“Do experts see them—the Als—as a threat?”

“Are you kidding? Six hundred years ago, maybe. Two
centuries ago the Secession made us leery. But if the things
wanted to hurt humanity, they could’ve done it long before
this. Worrying about Als turning on us is about as productive
as worrying that farm animals are going to revolt.”

“Except the Als are smarter than we,” | said.

“Yeah, well, there is that.”

“BB, have you heard of personality retrieval projects?”

“Like the Glennon-Height thing? Sure. Everyone has. |
even worked on one at Reichs University a few years ago.
But they’re passé. No one’s doing them anymore.”

“Why’s that?”

“Jesus, you don’t know shit about anything, do you,
Brawne? The personality retrieval projects were all
washouts. Even with the best sim control ... they got the

FORCE OCS:HTN network involved ... you can’t factor all
variables successfully. The persona template becomes self-
aware ... | don’t mean just self-aware, like you and me, but
self-aware that it’s an artificially self-aware persona—and
that leads to terminal Strange Loops and nonharmonic
labyrinths that go straight to Escher-space.”

“Translate,” | said.

BB sighed and glanced at the blue and gold time band on
the wall. Five minutes and his mandatory lunch hour was
over. He could rejoin the real world. “Translated,” he said,
“the retrieved personality breaks down. Goes crazy. Psycho
City. Bugfuck.”

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

“But the Als are still interested in the process?”

“Oh, yeah? Who says? They’ve never done one. All the
retrieval efforts I’ve ever heard of were human-run ... mostly
botched university projects. Brain-dead academics spending
fortunes to bring back dead academic brains.”

| forced a smile. There were three minutes until he could
plug back in. “Were all the retrieved personalities given
cybrid remotes?”

“Uh-uh. What gave you that idea, Brawne? None were.
Couldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“It'd just fuck up the stimsim. Plus you’d need perfect
clone stock and an interactive environment precise to the
last detail. You see, kiddo, with a retrieved personality, you
let it live in its world via full-scale sim and then you just
sneaked a few questions in via dreams or scenario
interactives. Pulling a persona out of sim reality into slow
time ...”

This was the cyberpukes’ age-old term for the ... pardon
the expression ... real world.

“a. would just drive it bugfuck all the sooner,” he
finished.

| shook my head. “Yeah, well, thanks, BB.” | moved to the
door. There were thirty seconds left before my old college
friend could escape from slow time.

“BB,” | said as an afterthought, “have you ever heard of a
persona retrieved from an Old Earth poet named John
Keats?”

“Keats? Oh, sure, there was a big write-up on that in my
undergrad text. Marti Carollus did that about fifty years ago
at New Cambridge.”

“What happened?”

“The usual. Persona invent Strange Loop. But before it
broke up it died a full sim death. Some ancient disease.” BB
glanced at the clock, smiled, and lifted his shunt. Before
clicking it into his skull socket he looked at me again, almost
beatifically. “I remember now,” he said through his dreamy
smile, “it was tuberculosis.”

° e ka

If our society ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach,
the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the
credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a
vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be
tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or
her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card
privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or
abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

Johnny’s credit wake for the five-day period leading to his
murder showed a man of regular habits and modest
expenses. Before following up the leads on the credit flimsy
I'd spent a dull two days following Johnny himself.

Data: He lived alone in East Bergson Hive. A routine check
showed that he’d lived there about seven local months—less
than five standard. In the morning he had breakfast at a
local cafe and then farcast to Renaissance Vector where he
worked for about five hours, evidently gathering research of
some sort in the print archives, followed by a light lunch ata

courtyard vendor’s stand, another hour or two in the library,
and then ‘cast home to Lusus or to some favorite eating spot
on another world. In his cubby by 2200 hours. More
farcasting than the average Lusian middle-class drone, but
an otherwise uninspiring schedule. The credit flimsies
confirmed that he had held to the agenda on the week he
was murdered, with the addition of a few extra purchases—
shoes one day, groceries the next—and one stop at a bar on
Renaissance V on the day of his “murder.”

| joined him for dinner at the small restaurant on Red
Dragon Street near the Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna portal.
The food was very hot, very spicy, and very good.

“How is it going?” he asked.

“Great. I’m a thousand marks richer than when we met
and | found a good Cantonese restaurant.”

“I’m glad my money is going toward something
important.”

“Speaking of your money ... where does it come from?
Hanging out in a Renaissance Vector library can’t pay
much.”

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “| live on a
small ... inheritance.”

“Not too small, | hope. | want to be paid.”

“It will be adequate for our purposes, M. Lamia. Have you
discovered anything of interest?”

| shrugged. “Tell me what you do in that library.”

“Can it possibly be germane?”

“Yeah, could be.”

He looked at me strangely. Something about his eyes
made me go weak at the knees. “You remind me of
someone,” he said softly.

“Oh?” From anyone else that line would have been cause
for an exit. “Who?” | asked.

“A ... woman | once knew. Long ago.” He brushed fingers
across his brow as if he were suddenly tired or dizzy.

“What was her name?”

“Fanny.” The word was almost whispered.

| Knew who he was talking about. John Keats had a fiancee
named Fanny. Their love affair had been a series of romantic
frustrations which almost drove the poet mad. When he died
in Italy, alone except for one fellow traveler, feeling
abandoned by friends and his lover, Keats had asked that
unopened letters from Fanny and a lock of her hair be buried
with him.

ld never heard of John Keats before this week; I'd
accessed all this shit with my comlog. | said, “So what do
you do at the library?”

The cybrid cleared his throat. “I’m researching a poem.
Searching for fragments of the original.”

“Something by Keats?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to access it?”

“Of course. But it is important for me to see the
Original ... to touch it.”

| thought about that. “What’s the poem about?”

He smiled ... or at least his lips did. The hazel eyes still
seemed troubled. “It’s called Hyperion. It’s difficult to
describe what it’s ... about. Artistic failure, | suppose. Keats
never finished it.”

| pushed aside my plate and sipped warm tea. “You say
Keats never finished it. Don’t you mean you never finished
it?”

His look of shock had to be genuine ... unless Als were
consummate actors. For all | knew, they could be. “Good
God,” he said, “I’m not John Keats. Having a persona based
upon a retrieval template no more makes me Keats than
having the name Lamia makes you a monster. There’ve been
a million influences that have separated me from that poor,
sad genius.”

“You said | reminded you of Fanny.”

“An echo of a dream. Less. You’ve taken RNA learning
medication, yes?”

“Yes.”

“It’s like that. Memories which feel ... hollow.”

A human waiter brought fortune cookies.

“Do you have any interest in visiting the real Hyperion?” |
asked.

“What’s that?”

“The Outback world. Somewhere beyond Parvati, | think.”

Johnny looked puzzled. He had broken open the cookie but
had not yet read the fortune.

“It used to be called Poets’ World, | think,” | said. “It even
has a city named after you ... after Keats.”

The young man shook his head. “I’m sorry, | haven’t heard
of the place.”

“How can that be? Don’t Als know everything?”

His laugh was short and sharp. “This one knows very
little.” He read his fortune: be wary of sudden impulses.

| crossed my arms. “You know, except for that parlor trick
with the bank manager holo, | have no proof that you are
what you say you are.”

“Give me your hand.”

“My hand?”

“Yes. Either one. Thank you.”

Johnny held my right hand in both of his. His fingers were
longer than mine. Mine were stronger.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

| did. There was no transition: one instant | was sitting in
the Blue Lotus on Red Dragon Street and the next |
was ... nowhere. Somewhere! Streaking through gray-blue
datumplane, banking along chrome-yellow information
highways, passing over and under and through great cities
of glowing information storage, red skyscrapers sheathed in
black security ice, simple entities like personal accounts or
corporate files blazing like burning refineries in the night.
Above it all, just out of sight as if poised in twisted space,
hung the gigantic weights of the Als, their simplest
communications pulsing like violent heat lightning along the

infinite horizons. Somewhere in the distance, all but lost in
the maze of three-dimensional neon that partitioned one
tiny second of arc in the incredible datasphere of one small
world, | sensed rather than saw those soft, hazel eyes
waiting for me.

Johnny released my hand. He cracked my fortune cookie
open. The strip of paper read: invest WISELY IN NEW VENTURES.

“Jesus,” | whispered. BB had taken me flying in
datumplane before, but without a shunt the experience had
been a shadow of this. It was the difference between
watching a black and white holo of a fireworks display and
being there. “How do you do that?”

“Will you be making any progress on the case tomorrow?”
he asked.

| regained my composure. “Tomorrow,” | said, “I plan to
solve it.”

Well, maybe not solve it, but at least get things moving.
The last charge on Johnny’s credit flimsy had been the bar
on Renaissance V. I’d checked it out the first day, of course,
talked to several of the regulars since there was no human
bartender, but had come up with no one who remembered
Johnny. I’d been back twice with no greater luck. But on the
third day | went back to stay until something broke.

The bar was definitely not in the class of the wood and
brass place Johnny and | had visited on TC2. This place was
tucked on a second floor of a decaying building in a run-
down neighborhood two blocks from the Renaissance library
where Johnny spent his days. Not the kind of place he would
stop in on the way to the farcaster plaza, but just the kind of
place he might end up if he met someone in or near the
library—someone who wanted to talk in private.

I'd been there six hours and was getting damned tired of
salted nuts and flat beer when an old derelict came in. |

guessed that he was a regular by the way he didn’t pause in
the doorway or look around, but headed straight for a small
table in the back and ordered a whiskey before the serving
mech had come to a full stop. When | joined him at the table
| realized that he wasn’t so much a derelict as an example of
the tired’men and women I'd seen in the junk shops and
street stalls in that neighborhood. He squinted up at me
through defeated eyes.

“May I sit down?”

“Depends, sister. What’re you selling?”

“I’m buying.” | sat, set my beer mug on the table, and slid
across a flat photo of Johnny entering the farcaster booth on
TC2. “Seen this guy?”

The old man glanced at the photo and returned his full
attention to his whiskey. “Maybe.”

| waved over the mech for another round. “If you did see
him, it’s your lucky day.”

The old man snorted and rubbed the back of his hand
against the gray stubble on his cheek. “If it is, it’ll be the
first time in a long fucking time.” He focused on me. “How
much? For what?”

“Information. How much depends on the information. Have
you seen him?” | removed a black market fifty-mark bill from
my tunic pocket.

“Yeah.”

The bill came down to the table but remained in my hand.
“When?”

“Last Tuesday. Tuesday morning.”

That was the correct day. | slid the fifty marks to him and
removed another bill. “Was he alone?”

The old man licked his lips. “Let me think. | don’t
think ... no, he was there.” He pointed toward a table at the
rear. “Two other guys with him. One of them ... well, that’s
why I remembered.”

“What’s that?”

The old man rubbed finger and thumb in a gesture as old
as greed.

“Tell me about the two men,” | coaxed.

“The young guy ... your guy ... he was with one of them,
you know, the nature freaks with robes. You see ’em on HTV
all the time. Them and their damn trees.”

Trees? “A Templar?” | said, astounded. What would a
Templar be doing in a Renaissance V bar? If he’d been after
Johnny, why would he wear his robe? That would be like a
murderer going out to do business in a clown suit.

“Yeah. Templar. Brown robe, sort of oriental-looking.”

“A man?”

“Yeah, | said he was.”

“Can you describe him more?”

“Nah. Templar. Tall son of a bitch. Couldn’t see his face
very well.”

“What about the other one?”

The old man shrugged. | removed a second bill and set
them both near my glass.

“Did they come in together?” | prompted. “The three of
them?”

“| don’t ... | can’t ... No, wait. Your guy and the Templar
guy came in first. | remember seeing the robe before the
other guy sat down.”

“Describe the other man.”

The old man waved over the mech and ordered a third
drink. | used my card and the servitor slid away on noisy
repellers.

“Like you,” he said. “Sort of like you.”

“Short?” | said. “Strong arms and legs? A Lusian?”

“Yeah. | guess so. Never been there.”

“What else?”

“No hair,” said the old man. “Just a whattyacallit like my
niece used to wear. A pony tail.”

“A queue,” | said.

“Yeah. Whatever.” He started to reach for the bills.

“Couple more questions. Did they argue?”

“Nah. Don’t think so. Talked real quiet. Place’s pretty
empty that time of day.”

“What time of day was it?”

“Morning. About ten o’clock.”

This coincided with the credit flimsy code.

“Did you hear any of the conversation?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Who did most of the talking?”

The old man took a drink and furrowed his brow in
thought. “Templar guy did at first. Your man seemed to be
answering questions. Seemed surprised once when | was
looking.”

“Shocked?”

“Uh-uh, just surprised. Like the guy in the robe’d said
something he didn’t expect.”

“You said the Templar did most of the talking at first. Who
spoke later? My guy?”

“Uh-uh, the one with the pony tail. Then they left.”

“All three of them left?”

“Nah. Your guy and the pony tail.”

“The Templar stayed behind?”

“Yeah. | guess so. | think. | went to the lav. When | got back
| don’t think he was there.”

“What way did the other two go?”

“I don’t know, goddammit. | wasn’t paying much attention.
| was having a drink, not playing spy!”

| nodded. The mech rolled over again but | waved it away.
The old man scowled at its back.

“So they weren’t arguing when they left? No sign of a
disagreement or that one was forcing the other to leave?”

“Who?”

“My guy and the queue.”

“Uh-uh. Shit, | don’t know.” He looked down at the bills in
his grimy hand and at the whiskey in the mech’s display
panel, realizing, perhaps, that he wasn’t going to get any

more of either from me. “Why do you want to know all this
shit, anyway?”

“I’m looking for the guy,” | said. | looked around the bar.
About twenty customers sat at tables. Most of them looked
like neighborhood regulars. “Anyone else here who might’ve
seen them? Or somebody else you might remember who was
here?”

“Uh-uh,” he said dully. | realized then that the old man’s
eyes were precisely the color of the whiskey he’d been
drinking.

| stood, set a final twenty-mark bill on the table. “Thanks,
friend.”

“Any time, sister.”

The mech was rolling toward him before I'd reached the
door.

° e ka

| walked back toward the library, paused a minute in the
busy farcaster plaza, and stood there a minute. Scenario so
far: Johnny had met the Templar or been approached by him,
either in the library or outside when he arrived in
midmorning. They went somewhere private to talk, the bar,
and something the Templar said surprised Johnny. A man
with a queue—possibly a Lusian—showed up and took over
the conversation. Johnny and Queue left together. Sometime
after that, Johnny farcast to TC2 and then farcast from there
with one other person—possibly Queue or the Templar—to
Madhya where someone tried to kill him. Did kill him.

Too many gaps. Too many “someones.” Not a hell of a lot to
show for a day’s work.

| was debating whether to 'cast back to Lusus when my
comlog chirped on the restricted comm frequency I’d given
to Johnny.

His voice was raw. “M. Lamia. Come quickly, please. | think
they’ve just tried again. To kill me.” The coordinates which
followed were for the East Bergson Hive.

| ran for the farcaster.

The door to Johnny’s cubby was open a crack. There was
no one in the corridor, no sounds from the apartment.
Whatever had happened hadn’t brought the authorities yet.

| brought out Dad’s automatic pistol from my coat pocket,
jacked a round into the chamber, and clicked on the laser
targeting beam with a single motion.

| went in low, both arms extended, the red dot sliding
across the dark walls, a cheap print on the far wall, a darker
hall leading into the cubby. The foyer was empty. The living
room and media pit were empty.

Johnny lay on the floor of the bedroom, his head against
the bed. Blood soaked the sheet. He struggled to prop
himself up, fell back. The sliding door behind him was open
and a dank industrial wind blew in from the open mall
beyond.

| checked the single closet, short hall, kitchen niche, and
came back to step out on the balcony. The view was
spectacular from the perch two hundred or so meters up the
curved Hive wall, looking down the ten or twenty kilometers
of the Trench Mall. The roof of the Hive was a dark mass of
girders another hundred or so meters above. Thousands of
lights, commercial holos, and neon lights glowed from the
mall, joining in the haze of distance to a brilliant, throbbing
electric blur.

There were hundreds of similar balconies on this wall of
the Hive, all deserted. The nearest was twenty meters away.
They were the kind of thing rental agents like to point to as
a plus—God knows that Johnny probably paid plenty extra
for an outside room—but the balconies were totally
impractical because of the strong wind rushing up toward
the ventilators, carrying the usual grit and debris as well as
the eternal Hive scent of oil and ozone.

| put my pistol away and went back to check on Johnny.

The cut ran from his hairline to his eyebrow, superficial but
messy. He was sitting up as | returned from the bathroom
with a sterile drypad and pressed it against the cut. “What
happened?” | said.

“Two men ... were waiting in the bedroom when | came in.
They’d bypassed the alarms on the balcony door.”

“You deserve a refund on your security tax,” | said. “What
happened next?”

“We struggled. They seemed to be dragging me toward
the door. One of them had an injector but | managed to
knock it out of his hand.”

“What made them leave?”

“I activated the in-house alarms.”

“But not Hive security?”

“No. | didn’t want them involved.”

“Who hit you?”

Johnny smiled sheepishly, “I did. They released me, | went
after them. | managed to trip and fall against the
nightstand.”

“Not a very graceful brawl on either side,” | said. |
switched on a lamp and checked the carpet until | found the
injection ampule where it had rolled under the bed.

Johnny eyed it as if it were a viper.

“What’s your guess?” | said. “More AIDS I1?”

He shook his head.

“| know a place where we can get it analyzed,” | said. “My
guess is that it’s just a hypnotic trank. They just wanted you
to come along ... not to kill you.”

Johnny moved the drypad and grimaced. The blood was
still flowing. “Why would anyone want to kidnap a cybrid?”

“You tell me. I’m beginning to think that the so-called
murder was just a botched kidnapping attempt.”

Johnny shook his head again.

| said, “Did one of the men wear a queue?”

“| don’t know. They wore caps and osmosis masks.”

“Was either one tall enough to be a Templar or strong
enough to be a Lusian?”

“A Templar?” Johnny was surprised. “No. One was about
average Web height. The one with the ampule could have
been Lusian. Strong enough.”

“So you went after a Lusian thug with your bare hands. Do
you have some bioprocessors or augmentation implants |
don’t know about?”

“No. | was just mad.”

| helped him to his feet. “So Als get angry?”

“| do.”

“Come on,” | said, “I know an automated med clinic that’s
discount. Then you'll be staying with me for a while.”

“With you? Why?”

“Because you've graduated from just needing a
detective,” | said. “Now you need a bodyguard.”

My cubby wasn’t registered in the Hive zoning schematic
as an apartment; I’d taken over a renovated warehouse loft
from a friend of mine who’d run afoul of loan sharks. My
friend had decided late in life to emigrate to one of the
Outback colonies and I’d gotten a good deal on a place just
a klick down the corridor frith my office. The environment
was a little rough and sometimes the noise from the loading
docks could drown out conversation, but it gave me ten
times the room of a normal cubby and | could use my
weights and workout equipment right at home.

Johnny honestly seemed intrigued by the place and | had
to kick myself for being pleased. Next thing you knew, I’d be
putting on lipstick and body rouge for this cybrid.

“So why do you live on Lusus?” | asked him. “Most
offworlders find the gravity a pain and the scenery
monotonous. Plus your research material’s at the library on
Renaissance V. Why here?”

| found myself looking and listening very carefully as he
answered. His hair was straight on top, parted in the middle,
and fell in reddish-brown curls to his collar. He had the habit
of resting his cheek on his fist as he spoke. It struck me that
his dialect was actually the nondialect of someone who has
learned a new language perfectly but without the lazy
shortcuts of someone born to it. And beneath that there was
a hint of lilt that brought back the overtones of a cat burglar
I'd known who had grown up on Asquith, a quiet, backwater
Web world settled by First Expansion immigrants from what
had once been the British Isles.

“| have lived on many worlds,” he said. “My purpose is to
observe.”

“AS a poet?”

He shook his head, winced, and gingerly touched the
stitches. “No. I’m not a poet. He was.”

Despite the circumstances, there was an energy and
vitality to Johnny that I'd found in too few men. It was hard
to describe, but I’d seen rooms fulls of more important
personages rearrange themselves to orbit around
personalities like his. It was not merely his reticence and
sensitivity, it was an intensity that he emanated even when
merely observing.

“Why do you live here?” he asked.

“I was born here.”

“Yes, but you spent your childhood years on Tau Ceti
Center. Your father was a senator.”

| said nothing.

“Many people expected you to go into politics,” he said.
“Did your father’s suicide dissuade you?”

“It wasn’t suicide,” | said.

“No?”

“All the news reports and the inquest said it was,” | said
tonelessly, “but they were wrong. My father never would
have taken his own life.”

“So it was murder?”

“Yes.”

“Despite the fact that there was no motive or hint of a
Suspect?”

“Yes.”

“| see,” said Johnny. The yellow glow from the loading dock
lamps came through the dusty windows and made his hair
gleam like new copper. “Do you like being a detective?”

“When I do it well,” | said. “Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Then let’s get some sleep. You can have the couch.”

“Do you do it well often?” he said. “Being a detective?”

“We'll see tomorrow.”

In the morning Johnny farcast to Renaissance Vector at
about the usual time, waited a moment in the plaza, and
then cast to the Old Settlers’ Museum on Sol Draconi
Septem. From there he jumped to the main terminex on
Nordholm and then ‘cast to the Templar world of God’s
Grove.

We’d worked out the timing ahead of time and | was
waiting for him on Renaissance V, standing back in the
shadows of the colonnade.

A man with a queue was the third through after Johnny.
There was no doubt he was Lusian—between the Hive pallor,
the muscle and body mass, and the arrogant way of walking,
he might have been my long-lost brother.

He never looked at Johnny but | could tell that he was
surprised when the cybrid circled around to the outbound
portals. | stayed back and only caught a glimpse of his card
but would’ve bet anything that it was a tracer.

Queue was careful in the Old Settlers’ Museum, keeping
Johnny in sight but checking his own back as well. | was
dressed in a Zen Gnostic’s meditation jumper, isolation visor
and all, and | never looked their way as | circled to the
museum outportal and ‘cast directly to God’s Grove.

It made me feel funny, leaving Johnny alone through the
museum and Nordholm terminex, but both were public
places and it was a calculated risk.

Johnny came through the Worldtree arrival portal right on
time and bought a ticket for the tour. His shadow had to
scurry to catch up, breaking cover to board the omnibus
skimmer before it left. | was already settled in the rear seat
on the upper deck and Johnny found a place near the front,
just as we had planned. Now | was wearing basic tourist garb
and my imager was one of a dozen in action when Queue
hurried to take his place three rows behind Johnny.

The tour of the Worldtree is always fun—Dad first took me
there when I was only three standard—but this time as the
skimmer moved above branches the size of freeways and
circled higher around a trunk the width of Olympus Mons, |
found myself reacting to the glimpses of hooded Templars
with something approaching anxiety.

Johnny and | had discussed various clever and infinitely
subtle ways to trail Queue if he showed up, to follow him to
his lair and spend weeks if necessary deducing his game. In
the end | opted for something less than the subtle approach.

The omnibus had dumped us out near the Muir Museum
and people were milling around on the plaza, torn between
spending ten marks for a ticket to educate themselves or
going straight for the gift shop, when | walked up to Queue,
gripped him by the upper arm, and said in conversational
tones, “Hi. Do you mind telling me what the fuck you want
with my client?”

There’s an old stereotype that says that Lusians are as
subtle as a stomach pump and about half as pleasant. If I’d
helped confirm the first part of that, Queue went a long way
toward reinforcing the second prejudice.

He was fast. Even with my seemingly casual grip
paralyzing the muscles of his right arm, the knife in his left
hand sliced up and around in less than a second.

| let myself fall to my right, the knife slicing air
centimeters from my cheek, hitting pavement and rolling as
| palmed the neural stunner and came up on one knee to
meet the threat.

No threat. Queue was running. Away from me. Away from
Johnny. He shoved tourists aside, dodged behind them,
moving toward the museum entrance.

| slid the stunner back into its wristband and began
running myself. Stunners are great close-range weapons—as
easy to aim as a shotgun without the dire effects if the
spread pattern finds innocent bystanders—but they aren’t
worth anything beyond eight or ten meters. On full
dispersal, | could give half the tourists in the plaza a
miserable headache but Queue was already too far away to
bring down. | ran after him.

Johnny ran toward me. | waved him back. “My place!” |
shouted. “Use the locks!”

Queue had reached the museum entrance and now he
looked back at me; the knife was still in his hand.

| charged at him, feeling something like joy at the thought
of the next few minutes.

Queue vaulted a turnstile and shoved tourists aside to get
through the doors. | followed.

It was only when | reached the vaulted interior of the
Grand Hall and saw him shoving his way up the crowded
escalator to the Excursion Mezzanine that | realized where
he was headed.

My father had taken me on the Templar Excursion when |
was three. The farcaster portals were permanently open; it
took about three hours to walk alt the guided tours on the
thirty worlds where the Templar ecologists had preserved
some bit of nature which they thought would please the
Muir. | couldn’t remember for sure, but | thought the paths
were loop trails with the portals relatively close together for
easy transit by Templar guides and maintenance people.

Shit.

A uniformed guard near the tour portal saw the confusion
as Queue cut through and stepped forward to intercept the
rude intruder. Even from fifteen meters away | could see the
shock and disbelief on the old guards face as he staggered
backward, the hilt of Queue’s long knife protruding from his
chest.

The old guard, probably a retired local cop, looked down,
face white, touched the bone hilt gingerly as if it were a gag,
and collapsed face first on the mezzanine tiles. Tourists
screamed. Someone yelled for a medic. | saw Queue shove a
Templar guide aside and throw himself through the glowing
portal.

This was not going as I'd planned.

| vaulted for the portal without slowing.

Through and half sliding on the slippery grass of a hillside.
Sky lemon yellow above us. Tropical scents. | saw startled
faces turned my way. Queue was halfway to the other
farcaster, cutting through elaborate flower beds and kicking
aside bonsai topiary. | recognized the world of Fuji and
careened down the hillside, clambering uphill again through
the flower beds, following the trail of destruction Queue had
left. “Stop that man!” | screamed, realizing how foolish it
sounded. No one made a move except for a Nipponese
tourist who raised her imager and recorded a sequence.

Queue looked back, shoved past a gawking tour group,
and stepped through the farcast portal.

| had the stunner in my hand again and waved it at the
crowd. “Back! Back!” They hastily made room.

| went through warily, stunner raised. Queue no longer
had his knife but | didn’t know what other toys he carried.

Brilliant light on water. The violet waves of Mare Infinitus.
The path was a narrow wooden walkway ten meters above
the support floats. It led out and away, curving above a
fairyland coral reef and a sargasso of yellow island kelp
before curving back, but a narrow catwalk cut across to the

portal at the end of the trail. Queue had climbed the no
access gate and was halfway across the catwalk.

| ran the ten paces to the edge of the platform, selected
tightbeam, and held the stunner on full auto, sweeping the
invisible beam back and forth as if | were aiming a garden
hose.

Queue seemed to stumble a half step but then made the
last ten meters to the portal and dived through. | cursed and
climbed the gate, ignoring shouts from a Templar guide
behind me. | caught a glimpse of a sign which reminded
tourists to don therm gear and then | was through the portal,
barely sensing the shower-tingle sensation of passing
through the farcaster screen.

A blizzard roared, whipping against the arched
containment field which turned the tourist trail into a tunnel
through fierce whiteness. Sol Draconi Septem—the northern
reaches where Templar lobbying of the All Thing had
stopped the colonial heating project in order to save the
arctic wraiths. | could feel the 1.7-standard gravity on my
shoulders like the yoke of my workout machine. It was a
shame that Queue was a Lusian also; if he’d been Web-
standard in physique, there would have been no contest if |
caught him here. Now we would see who was in better
shape.

Queue was fifty meters down the trail and looking back
over his shoulder. The other farcaster was somewhere near
but the blizzard made anything off the trail invisible and
inaccessible. | began loping after him. In deference to the
gravity, this was the shortest of the Templar Excursion trails,
curving back after only two hundred or so meters. | could
hear Queue’s panting as | closed on him. | was running
easily; there was no way that he was going to beat me to the
next farcaster. | saw no tourists on the trail and so far no one
had given chase. | thought that this would not be a bad
place to interrogate him.

Queue was thirty meters short of the exit portal when he
turned, dropped to one knee, and aimed an energy pistol.
The first bolt was short, possibly because of the
unaccustomed weight of the weapon in Sol Draconi’s gravity
field, but it was close enough to leave a scorched slash of
slagged walkway and melted permafrost to within a meter of
me. He adjusted his aim.

| went out through the containment field, shouldering my
way through the elastic resistance and stumbling into drifts
above my waist. The cold air burned my lungs and wind-
driven snow caked my face and bare arms in seconds. |
could see Queue looking for me from within the lighted
pathway, but the blizzard dimness worked in my favor now
as | threw myself through drifts in his direction.

Queue forced his head, shoulders, and right arm through
the field wall, squinting in the barrage of icy particles which
coated his cheeks and brow in an instant. His second shot
was high and | felt the heat of the bolt as it passed over. |
was within ten meters of him now; | set the stunner on
widest dispersal and sprayed it in his direction without
lifting my head from the snowdrift where | had dropped.

Queue let the energy pistol tumble into the snow and fell
back through the containment field.

| screamed in triumph, my shout lost in the wind roar, and
staggered toward the field wall. My hands and feet were
distant things now, beyond the pain of cold. My cheeks and
ears burned. | put the thought of frostbite out of my mind
and threw myself against the field.

It was a class-three field, designed to keep out the
elements and anything as huge as an arctic wraith, while
allowing the occasional errant tourist or errand-bent Templar
reentry to the path, but in my cold-weakened condition |
found myself batting against it for half a moment like a fly
against plastic, my feet slipping on snow and ice. Finally |
threw myself forward, landing heavily and clumsily,
dragging my legs through.

The sudden warmth of the pathway set me to shaking
uncontrollably. Shards of sleet fell from me as | forced myself
to my knees, then to my feet.

Queue ran the last five yards to the exit portal with his
right arm dangling as if broken. | knew the nerve-fire agony
of a neural stunner and did not envy him. He looked back
once as | began running toward him and then he went
through.

Maui-Covenant. The air was tropical and smelled of ocean
and vegetation. The sky was an Old Earth blue. | saw
immediately that the trail had led to one of the few free
motile isles which the Templars had saved from Hegemony
domestication. It was a large isle, perhaps half a kilometer
from end to end, and from the access portal’s vantage point
on a wide deck encircling the main treesail trunk | could see
the expansive sail leaves filling with wind and the indigo
rudder vines trailing far behind. The exit portal lay only
fifteen meters away down a staircase but | saw at once that
Queue had run the other way, along the main trail, toward a
cluster of huts and concession stands near the edge of the
isle.

It was only here, halfway along the Templar Excursion trail,
that they allowed human structures to shelter weary hikers
while they purchased refreshments or souvenirs to benefit
the Templar Brotherhood. | began jogging down the wide
staircase to the trail below, still shivering, my clothes soaked
with rapidly melting snow. Why was Queue running toward
the cluster of people there?

| saw the bright carpets laid out for rental and understood.
The hawking mats were illegal on most Web worlds but still a
tradition on Maui-Covenant because of the Siri legend; less
than two meters long and a meter wide, the ancient
playthings lay waiting to carry tourists out over the sea and
back again to the wandering isle. If Queue reached one of
those ... | broke into a full sprint, catching the other Lusian a
few meters short of the hawking mat area and tackling him

just below the knees. We rolled into the concession stand
area and the few tourists there shouted and scattered.

My father taught me one thing which any child ignores at
his or her own peril: a good big guy can always beat a good
little guy. In this case we were about even. Queue twisted
free and jumped to his feet, falling into an arms-out, fingers-
splayed oriental fighting stance. Now we'd see who the
better guy was.

Queue got the first blow in, feinting a straight-fingered jab
with his left hand and coming up and around with a
swinging kick instead. | ducked but he connected solidly
enough to make my left shoulder and upper arm go numb.

Queue danced backward. | followed. He swung a close-
fisted right-handed punch. | blocked it. He chopped with his
left hand. | blocked with my right forearm. Queue danced
back, whirled, and unleashed a left-footed kick. | ducked,
caught his leg as it passed over, and dumped him on the
sand.

Queue jumped up. | Knocked him down with a short left
hook. He rolled away and scrambled to his knees. | kicked
him behind his left ear, pulling the blow enough to leave
him conscious.

Too conscious, | realized a second later as he ran four
fingers under my guard in an attempted heart jab. Instead,
he bruised the layers of muscle under my right breast. |
punched him full force in the mouth, sending blood spraying
as he rolled to the waterline and lay still. Behind us, people
ran toward the exit portal, calling to the few others to get
the police.

| lifted Johnny’s would-be assassin by his queue, dragged
him to the edge of the isle, and dipped his face in the water
until he came to. Then I rolled him over and lifted him by his
torn and stained shirtfront. We would have only a minute or
two until someone arrived.

Queue stared up at me with a glazed glare. | shook him
once and leaned close. “Listen, my friend,” | whispered.

“We're going to have a short but sincere conversation. We'll
start with who you are and why you're bothering the guy
you were following.”

| felt the surge of current before | saw the blue. | cursed
and let go of his shirtfront. The electrical nimbus seemed to
surround Queue’s entire body at once. | jumped back but
not before my own hair stood on end and surge control
alarms on my comlog chirped urgently. Queue opened his
mouth to scream and | could see the blue within like a
poorly done holo special effect. His shirtfront sizzled,
blackened, and burst into flame. Beneath it his chest grew
blue spots like an ancient film burning through. The spots
widened, joined, widened again. | looked into his chest
cavity and saw organs melting in blue flame. He screamed
again, audibly this time, and | watched as teeth and eyes
collapsed into blue fire.

| took another step back.

Queue was burning now, the orange-red flames
superseding the blue glow. His flesh exploded outward with
flame as if his bones had ignited. Within a minute he was a
smoking caricature of charred flesh, the body reduced to the
ancient dwarf-boxer posture of burning victims everywhere. |
turned away and put a hand over my mouth, searching the
faces of the few watchers to see if any of them could have
done this. Wide, frightened eyes stared back. Far above,
gray security uniforms burst from the farcaster.

Damn. | looked around. The treesails surged and billowed
overhead. Radiant gossamers, beautiful even in daylight,
flitted among tropical vegetation of a hundred hues.
Sunlight danced on blue ocean. The way to both portals was
blocked. The security guard leading the group had drawn a
weapon.

| was to the first hawking mat in three strides, trying to
remember from my one ride two decades earlier how the
flight threads were activated. | tapped designs in
desperation.

The hawking mat went rigid and lifted ten centimeters off
the beach. | could hear the shouts now as security guards
reached the edge of the crowd. A woman in gaudy
Renaissance Minor garb pointed my way. | jumped off the
hawking mat, gathered up the other seven mats, and
jumped aboard my own. Barely able to find the flight
designs under the tumble of rugs, | slapped the forward
controls until the mat lurched into flight, almost tumbling
me off as it rose.

Fifty meters out, thirty meters high, | dumped the other
mats into the sea and swiveled to see what was happening
on the beach. Several gray uniforms were huddled around
the burned remains. Another pointed a silver wand in my
direction.

Delicate needles of pain tingled along my arm, shoulders,
and neck. My eyelids drooped and | almost slid off the mat to
my right. | gripped the far side with my left hand, slumped
forward, and tapped at the ascent design with fingers made
of wood. Climbing again, | fumbled at my right sleeve for my
own stunner. The wristband was empty.

A minute later | sat up and shook off most of the effects of
the stun, although my fingers still burned and | had a fierce
headache. The motile isle was far behind, shrinking more
each second. A century ago the island would have been
driven by the bands of dolphins brought here originally
during the Hegira, but the Hegemony pacification program
during the Siri Rebellion had killed off most of the aquatic
mammals and now the islands wandered listlessly, carrying
their cargo of Web tourists and resort owners.

| checked the horizons for another island, a hint of one of
the rare mainlands. Nothing. Or, rather, blue sky, endless
ocean, and soft brushstrokes of clouds far to the west. Or
was it to the east?

| pulled my comlog off my belt lock and keyed in general
data-sphere access, then stopped. If the authorities had
chased me this far, the next step would be to pinpoint my

location and send out a skimmer or security EMV. | wasn’t
sure if they could trace my comlog when | logged in but |
Saw no reason to help them. | thumbed the comm-link on
standby and looked around again.

Good move, Brawne. Poking along at two hundred! meters
on a three-century-old hawking mat with who knows how
many ... or how few! ... hours of charge in its flight threads,
possibly a thousand klicks or more from land of any sort.
And lost. Great. | crossed my arms and sat back to think.

“M. Lamia?” Johnny’s soft voice almost made me jump off
the mat.

“Johnny?” | stared at the comlog. It was still on standby.
The general comm frequency indicator was dark. “Johnny, is
that you?”

“Of course. | thought you’d never turn your comlog on.”

“How did you trace me? What band are you calling on?”

“Never mind that. Where are you headed?”

| laughed and told him that | didn’t have the slightest
idea. “Can you help?”

“Wait.” There was the briefest second of pause. “All right, |
have you on one of the weather-mapping sats. A terribly
primitive thing. Good thing your hawking mat has a passive
transponder.”

| stared at the rug that was the only tiling between me and
a long, loud fall to the sea. “It does? Can the others track
me?”

“They could,” said Johnny, “but I’m jamming this
particular signal. Now, where do you want to go?”

“Home.”

“I’m not sure if that’s wise after the death of ... ah ... our
suspect.”

| squinted, suddenly suspicious. “How do you know about
that? | didn’t say anything.”

“Be serious, M. Lamia. The security bands are full of it on
six worlds. They have a reasonable description of you.”

“Shit.”

“Precisely. Now where would you like to go?”

“Where are you?” | asked. “My place?”

“No. | left there when the security bands mentioned you.
I’m... near a farcaster.”

“That’s where | need to be.” | looked around again. Ocean,
sky, a hint of clouds. At least no fleets of EMVs.

‘All right,” said Johnny’s disembodied voice. “There’s a
powered-down FORCE multi-portal less than ten klicks from
your present location.”

| shielded my eyes and rotated three hundred and sixty!
degrees. “The hell there is,” | said. “I don’t know how far
away the horizon is on this world, but it’s at least forty klicks
and | can’t see anything.”

“Submersible base,” said Johnny. “Hang on. I’m going to
take control.”

The hawking mat lurched again, dipped once, and then
fell steadily. | held on with both hands and resisted the urge
to scream.

“Submersible,” | called against the wind rush, “how far?”

“Do you mean how deep?”

“Yeah!”

“Eight fathoms.”

| converted the archaic units to meters. This time | did
scream. “That’s almost fourteen meters underwater!”

“Where else do you expect a submersible to be?”

“What the hell do you expect me to do, hold my breath?”
The ocean rushed toward me.

“Not necessary,” said my comlog. “The hawking mat has a
primitive crash field. It should easily hold for a mere eight
fathoms. Please hang on.”

| hung on.

Johnny was waiting for me when | arrived. The submersible
had been dark and dank with the sweat of abandonment;
the farcaster had been of a military variety I’d never seen

before. It was a relief to step into sunlight and a city street
with Johnny waiting.

| told him what had happened with Queue. We walked
empty streets past old buildings. The sky was pale blue
fading toward evening. No one was in sight. “Hey,” | said,
stopping, “where are we?” It was an incredibly Earthlike
world but the sky, the gravity, the texture of the place was
like nothing I'd visited.

Johnny smiled. “I'll let you guess. Let’s walk some more.”

There were ruins to our left as we walked down a wide
street. | stopped and stared. “That’s the Colosseum,” | said.
“The Roman Colosseum on Old Earth.” | looked around at the
aging buildings, the cobblestone streets, and the trees
swaying slightly in a soft breeze. “This is a reconstruction of
the Old Earth city of Rome,” | said, trying to keep the
astonishment out of my voice. “New Earth?” | knew at once
that it wasn’t. I'd been to New Earth numerous times and the
sky tones, smells, and gravity had not been like this.

Johnny shook his head. “This is nowhere in the Web.”

| stopped walking. “That’s impossible.” By definition, any
world which could be reached by farcaster was in the Web.

“Nonetheless, it is not in the Web.”

“Where is it then?”

“Old Earth.”

We walked on. Johnny pointed out another ruin. “The
Forum.” Descending a long staircase, he said, “Ahead is the
Piazza di Spagna where we'll spend the night.”

“Old Earth,” | said, my first comment in twenty minutes.
“Time travel?”

“That is not possible, M. Lamia.”

“A theme park then?”

Johnny laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, unself-conscious
and easy. “Perhaps. | don’t really know its purpose or
function. It is... an analog.”

“An analog.” | squinted at the red, setting sun just visible
down a narrow street. “It looks like the holos I’ve seen of Old
Earth. It feels right, even though I’ve never been there.”

“It is very accurate.”

“Where is it? | mean, what star?”

“I don’t know the number,” said Johnny. “It’s in the
Hercules Cluster.”

| managed not to repeat what he said but | stopped and
sat down on one of the steps. With the Hawking drive
humankind had explored, colonized, and linked with
farcaster worlds across many thousands of light-years. But
no one had tried to reach the exploding Core suns. We had
barely crawled out of the cradle of one spiral arm. The
Hercules Cluster.

“Why has the TechnoCore built a replica of Rome in the
Hercules Cluster?” | asked.

Johnny sat next to me. We both looked up as a whirling
mass of pigeons exploded into flight and wheeled above the
rooftops. “I don’t know, M. Lamia. There is much that | have
not learned ... at least partially because | have not been
interested until now.”

“Brawne,” | said.

“Excuse me?”

“Call me Brawne.”

Johnny smiled and inclined his head. “Thank you, Brawne.
One thing, though. | do not believe that it is a replica of the
city of Rome alone. It is all of Old Earth.”

| set both hands on the sun-warmed stone of the step | was
sitting on. “A// of Old Earth? All of its ... continents, cities?”

“| believe so. | haven’t been out of Italy and England
except for a sea voyage between the two, but | believe the
analog is complete.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

Johnny nodded slowly. “That may indeed be the case. Why
don’t we go inside and eat and talk more about this? It may
relate to who tried to kill me and why.”

“Inside” was an apartment in a large house at the foot of
the marble stairs. Windows looked out on what Johnny called
the “piazza” and | could see up the staircase to a large,
yellow-brown church above, and down to the square where a
boat-shaped fountain tossed water into the evening
stillness. Johnny said that the fountain had been designed
by Bernini but the name meant nothing to me.

The rooms were small but high-ceilinged, with rough but
elaborately carved furniture from an era | did not recognize.
There was no sign of electricity or modern appliances. The
house did not respond when | spoke to it at the door and
again in the apartment upstairs. As dusk fell over the square
and city outside the tall windows, the only lights were a few
streetlamps of gas or some more primitive combustible.

“This is out of Old Earth’s past,” | said, touching the thick
pillows. | raised my head, suddenly understanding. “Keats
died in Italy. Early ... nineteenth or twentieth century. This
is... then.”

“Yes. Early nineteenth century: 1821, to be precise.”

“The whole world is a museum?”

“Oh no. Different areas are different eras, of course. It
depends upon the analog being pursued.”

“| don’t understand.” We had moved into a room cluttered
with thick furniture and | sat on an oddly carved couch by a
window. A film of gold evening light still touchcd the spire of
the tawny church up the steps. Pigeons wheeled white
against blue Sky. “Are there millions of
people ... cybrids ... living on this fake Old Earth?”

“I do not believe so,” said Johnny. “Only the number
necessary for the particular analog project.” He saw that |
still did not understand and took a breath before continuing.
“When |... awoke here, there were cybrid analogs of Joseph
Severn, Dr. Clark, the landlady Anna Angeletti, young
Lieutenant Elton, and a few others. Italian shopkeepers, the
owner of the trattoria across the square who used to bring us

our food, passersby, that sort of thing. No more than a score
at the most.”

“What happened to them?”

“They were probably ... recycled. Like the man with the
queue.”

“Queue ...” | suddenly stared across the darkening room at
Johnny. “He was a cybrid?”

“Without doubt. The self-destruction you described is
precisely the way | would rid myself of this cybrid if | had
to.”

My mind was racing. | realized how stupid | had been, how
little | had learned about anything. “Then it was another Al
who tried to kill you.”

“It seems that way.”

“Why?”

Johnny made a gesture with his hands. “Possibly to erase
some quantum of knowledge that died with my cybrid.
Something | had learned only recently and the other Al ... or
Als knew would be destroyed in my systems crash.”

| stood, paced back and forth, and stopped at the window.
The darkness was settling in earnest now. There were lamps
in the room but Johnny made no move to light them and |
preferred the dimness. It made the unreality of what | was
hearing even that much more unreal. | looked into the
bedroom. The western windows admitted the last of the
light; bedclothes glowed whitely. “You died here,” | said.

“He did,” said Johnny. “I am not he.”

“But you have his memories.”

“Half-forgotten dreams. There are gaps.”

“But you know what he felt.”

“| remember what the designers thought that he felt.”

“Tell me.”

“What?” Johnny’s skin was very pale in the gloom. His
short curls looked black.

“What it was like to die. What it was like to be reborn.”

Johnny told me, his voice very soft, almost melodic,
lapsing sometimes into an English too archaic to be
understood but far more beautiful to the ear than the hybrid
tongue we speak today.

He told me what it was like to be a poet obsessed with
perfection, far harsher toward his own efforts than even the
most vicious critic. And the critics were vicious. His work was
dismissed, ridiculed, described as derivative and silly. Too
poor to marry the woman he loved, loaning money to his
brother in America and thus losing the last chance of
financial security ... and then the brief glory of growing into
the full maturation of his poetic powers just as he fell prey to
the “consumption” which had claimed his mother and his
brother Tom. Then sent off to exile in Italy, reputedly “for his
health” while knowing all the while it meant a lonely, painful
death at the age of twenty-six. He talked of the agony of
seeing Fanny’s handwriting on the letters he found too
painful to open; he talked of the loyalty of the young artist
Joseph Severn, who had been chosen as a traveling
companion for Keats by “friends” who had abandoned the
poet at the end, of how Severn had nursed the dying man
and stayed with him during the final days. He told of the
hemorrhages in the night, of Dr. Clark bleeding him and
prescribing “exercise and good air,” and of the ultimate
religiouS and personal despair which had led Keats to
demand his own epitaph be carved in stone as: “Here lies
One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

Only the dimmest light from below outlined the tall
windows. Johnny’s voice seemed to float in the night-
scented air. He spoke of awakening after his death in the
bed where he died, still attended by the loyal Severn and Dr.
Clark, of remembering that he was the poet John Keats the
way one remembers an identity from a fast-fading dream
while all the while knowing that he was something else.

He told of the illusion continued, the trip back to England,
the reunion with the Fanny-who-was-not-Fanny and the near

mental breakdown this had engendered. He told of his
inability to write further poetry, of his increasing
estrangement from the cybrid impostors, of his retreat into
something resembling catatonia combined with
“hallucinations” of his true Al existence in the nearly
incomprehensible (to a nineteenth-century poet)
TechnoCore, and of the ultimate crumbling of the illusion
and the abandonment of the “Keats Project.”

“In truth,” he said, “the entire, evil charade made me think
of nothing so much as a passage in a letter | wrote ... he
wrote ... to his brother George some time before his illness.
Keats said:

“May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though
instinctive attitude my mind may fail into, as | am entertained with the
alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the
streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. By a
superior being our reasonings may take the same tone—though
erroneous they may be fine—This is the very thing in which consists
poetry.”

“You think the ... Keats Project ... was evil?” | asked.

“Anything which deceives is evil, | believe.”

“Perhaps you are more John Keats than you are willing to
admit.”

“No. The absence of poetic instinct showed otherwise even
in the midst of the most elaborate illusion.”

| looked at the dark outlines of shapes in the dark house.
“Do the Als know that we're here?”

“Probably. Almost surely. There is no place that | can go
that the TechnoCore cannot trace and follow. But it was the
Web authorities and brigands from whom we fled, no?”

“But you know now that it was someone ... some
intelligence in the TechnoCore who assaulted you.”

“Yes, but only in the Web. Such violence in the Core would
not be tolerated.”

There came a noise from the street. A pigeon, | hoped.
Wind blowing trash across cobblestones perhaps. | said,
“How will the TechnoCore respond to, my being here?”

“| have no idea.”

“Surely it must be a secret.”

“It is ... something they consider irrelevant to humanity.”

| shook my head, a futile gesture in the darkness. “The
recreation of Old Earth ... the resurrection of ... how
many? ... human personalities as cybrids on this recreated
world ... Als killing Als ... irrelevant!” | laughed but managed
to keep the laughter under control. “Jesus wept, Johnny.”

“Almost certainly.”

| moved to the window, not caring what sort of target |
would afford anyone in the dark street below, and fumbled
out a cigarette. They were damp from the afternoons chase
through the snowdrifts but one lighted when | struck it.
“Johnny, earlier when you said that the Old Earth analog was
complete, | said, ‘Why, for God’s sake?’ and you said
something like ‘That may be the case.’ Was that just a
wiseass comment or did you mean something?”

“| mean that it might indeed be for God’s sake.”

“Explain.”

Johnny sighed in the darkness. “I don’t understand the
exact purpose of the Keats Project or the other Old Earth
analogs, but | suspect that it is part of a TechnoCore project
going back at least seven standard centuries to realize the
Ultimate Intelligence.”

“The Ultimate Intelligence,” | said, exhaling smoke. “Uh-
huh. So the TechnoCore is trying to ... what? ... to build
God.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“There is no simple answer, Brawne. Any more than there
is a simple answer to the question of why humankind has
sought God in a million guises for ten thousand generations.

But with the Core, the interest lies more in the quest for
more efficiency, more reliable ways to handle ... variables.”

“But the TechnoCore can draw on itself and the
megadatasphere of two hundred worlds.”

“And there still will be blanks in the ... predictive powers.”

| threw my cigarette out the window, watching the ember
fall into the night. The breeze was suddenly cold; | hugged
my arms. “How does all this ... Old Earth, the resurrection
projects, the cybrids ... how docs it lead to creating the
Ultimate Intelligence?”

“| don’t know, Brawne. Eight standard centuries ago, at
the beginning of the First Information Age, a man named
Norbert Wiener wrote: ‘Can God play a significant game with
his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play
a significant game with his own creature?’ Humanity dealt
with this inconclusively with their early Als. The Core
wrestles with it in the resurrection projects. Perhaps the UI
program has been completed and all of this remains a
function of the ultimate Creature/Creator, a personality
whose motives are as far beyond the Core’s understanding
as the Core’s are beyond humanity’s.”

| started to move in the dark room, bumped a low table
with my knee, and remained standing. “None of which tells
us who is trying to kill you,” | said.

“No.” Johnny rose and moved to the far wall. A match
flared and he lighted a candle. Our shadows wavered on the
walls and ceiling.

Johnny came closer and softly gripped my upper arms. The
soft light painted his curls and eyelashes copper and
touched his high cheekbones and firm chin. “Why are you so
tough?” he asked.

| stared at him. His face was only inches from mine. We
were the same height. “Let go,” | said;

Instead, he leaned forward and kissed me. His lips were
soft and warm and the kiss seemed to last for hours. He’s a
machine, | thought. Human, but a machine behind that. |

closed my eyes. His soft hand touched my cheek, my neck,
the back of my head.

“Listen ...” | whispered when we broke apart for an instant.

Johnny did not let me finish. He lifted me in his arms and
carried me into the other room. The tall bed. The soft
mattress and deep comforter. The candlelight from the other
room flickered and danced as we undressed each other in a
sudden urgency.

We made love three times that night, each time
responding to slow, sweet imperatives of touch and warmth
and closeness and the escalating intensity of sensation. |
remember looking down at him the second time; his eyes
were closed, hair fell loosely across his forehead, the
candlelight showing the flush across his pale chest, his
surprisingly strong arms and hands rising to hold me place.
He had opened his eyes that second to look back at me and |
Saw only the emotion and passion of that moment reflected
there.

Sometime before dawn we slept and, just as | turned away
and drifted off, | felt the cool touch of his hand on my hip in
a movement protective and casual without being possessive.

They hit us just after first light. There were five of them,
not Lusian but heavily muscled, all men, and they worked
well together as a team.

The first | heard them was when the door to the apartment
was kicked open. | rolled out of bed, jumped to the side of
the bedroom door, and watched them come through. Johnny
sat up and shouted something as the first man leveled a
stunner. Johnny had pulled on cotton shorts before going to
sleep; | was nude. There are real disadvantages to fighting in
the nude when one’s opponents are dressed, but the
greatest problem is psychological. If you can get over the
sense of heightened vulnerability, the rest is easy to
compensate for.

The first man saw me, decided to stun Johnny anyway, and
paid for the mistake. | kicked the weapon out of his hand
and clubbed him down with a blow behind the left ear. Two
more men pushed into the room. This time both of them
were smart enough to deal with me first. Two others leaped
for Johnny.

| blocked a stiff-fingered jab, parried a kick that would
have done real damage, and backed away. There was a tall
dresser to my left and the top drawer came out smooth and
heavy. The big man in front of me shielded his face with both
arms so that the thick wood splintered, but the instinctive
reaction gave me a second’s opening and | took it, putting
my entire body into the kick. Number two man grunted and
fell back against his partner.

Johnny was struggling but one of the intruders had him
around the throat in a choke hold while the other pinned his
legs. | came off the floor in a crouch, accepted the blow from
my number two, and leaped across the bed. The guy holding
Johnny’s legs went through the glass and wood of the
window without a word.

Someone landed on my back and | completed the roll
across the bed and floor, bringing him up against the wall.
He was good. He took the blow on his shoulder and went for
a nerve pinch beneath my ear. He had a second of trouble
because of the extra layers of muscle there and | got an
elbow deep into his stomach and rolled away. The man
choking Johnny dropped him and delivered a textbook-
perfect kick to my ribs. | took half the impact, feeling at
least one rib go, and spun inside, attempting no elegance as
| used my left hand to crush his left testicle. The man
screamed and was out of it.

I'd never forgotten the stunner on the floor and neither
had the last of the opposition. He scurried around to the far
side of the bed, out of reach, and dropped to all fours to grab
the weapon. Definitely feeling the pain from the broken rib

now, | lifted the massive bed with Johnny in it and dropped it
on the guy’s head and shoulders.

| went under the bed from my side, retrieved the stunner,
and backed into an empty corner.

One guy had gone out the window. We were on the second
floor. The first man to enter was still lying in the doorway.
The guy l’d kicked had managed to get to one knee and
both elbows. From the blood on his mouth and chin, |
guessed that a rib had punctured a lung. He was breathing
very raggedly. The bed had crushed the skull of the other
man on the floor. The guy who'd been choking Johnny was
curled up near the window, holding his crotch and vomiting.
| stunned him into silence and went over to the one I'd
kicked and lifted him by the hair. “Who sent you?”

“Fuck you.” He sprayed some bloody spittle in my face.

“Maybe later,” | said. “Again, who sent you?” | placed three
fingers against his side where the ribcage seemed concave
and pressed.

The man screamed and went very white. When he
coughed the blood was too red against pale skin.

“Who sent you?” | set four fingers against his ribs.

“The bishop!” He tried to levitate away from my fingers.

“What bishop?”

“Shrike Temple ... Lusus ... don’t, please ... oh, shit....”

“What were you going to do with him... us?”

“Nothing.... oh, God damn ... don’t! | need a medic,
please!”

“Sure. Answer.”

“Stun him, bring him ... back to the Temple ... Lusus.
Please. | can’t breathe.”

“And me?”

“Kill you if you resisted.”

“Okay,” | said, lifting him a little higher by his hair, “we’re
doing fine here. What did they want him for?”

“| don’t know.” He screamed very loudly. | kept one eye on
the doorway to the apartment. The stunner was still in my

palm under a fistful of hair. “I ... don’t ... know ...” he
gasped. He was hemorrhaging in earnest now. The blood
dripped on my arm and left breast.

“How'd you get here?”

“EMV ... roof.”
“Where'd you ‘cast in?”
“Don't know ... | swear... some city in the water. Car’s set

to return there ... please!”

| ripped at his clothes. No comlog. No other weapons.
There was a tattoo of a blue trident just above his heart.
“Goonda?” | said.

“Yeah ... Parvati Brotherhood.”

Outside the Web. Probably very hard to trace. “All of you?”

“Yeah... please... get me some help _...oh,
Shit ... please ...” He sagged, almost unconscious.

| dropped him, stepped back, and sprayed the stun beam
over him.

Johnny was sitting up, rubbing his throat, and staring at
me with a strange gaze.

“Get dressed,” | said. “We're leaving.”

The EMV was an old, transparent Vikken Scenic with no
palm-locks on the ignition plate or diskey. We caught up to
the terminator before we had crossed France and looked
down on darkness that Johnny said was the Atlantic Ocean.
Except for lights of the occasional floating city or drilling
platform, the only illumination came from the stars and the
broad, swimming-pool glows of the undersea colonies.

“Why are we taking their vehicle?” asked Johnny.

“| want to see where they farcast from.”

“He said the Lusus Shrike Temple.”

“Yeah. Now well see.”

Johnny’s face was barely visible as he looked down at the
dark sea twenty klicks below. “Do you think those men will
die?”

“One was already dead,” | said. “The guy with the
punctured lung will need help. Two of them’II be okay. | don’t
know about the one who went out the window. Do you
care?”

“Yes. The violence was ... barbaric.”

“ ‘Though a quarrel in the street is a thing to be hated, the
energies displayed in it are fine,’ ” | quoted. “They weren’t
cybrids, were they?”

“I think not.”

“So there are at least two groups out to get you ... the Als
and the bishop of the Shrike Temple. And we still don’t know
why.”

“I do have an idea now.”

| swiveled in the foam recliner. The constellations above us
—familiar neither from holos of Old Earth’s skies nor from
any Web world | knew—cast just enough light to allow me to
see Johnny’s eyes. “Tell me,” | said.

“Your mention of Hyperion gave me a clue,” he said. “The
fact that | had no knowledge of it. Its absence said that it
was important.”

“The strange case of the dog barking in the night,” | said.
“What?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

Johnny leaned closer. “The only reason that | would not be
aware of it is that some elements of the TechnoCore have
blocked my knowledge of it.”

“Your cybrid ...” It was strange to talk to Johnny that way
now. “You spend most of your time in the Web, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn't you run across mention of Hyperion
somewhere? It’s in the news every once in a while,
especially when the Shrike Cult’s topical.”

“Perhaps | did hear. Perhaps that is why | was murdered.”

| lay back and looked at the stars. “Let’s go ask the
bishop,” | said.

Johnny said that the lights ahead were an analog of New
York City in the mid-twenty-first century. He didn’t know
what resurrection project the city had been rebuilt for. | took
the EMV off auto and dropped lower.

Tall buildings from the phallic-symbol era of urban
architecture rose from the swamps and lagoons of the North
American littoral. Several had lights burning. Johnny pointed
to one decrepit but oddly elegant structure and said, “The
Empire State Building.”

“Okay,” | said. “Whatever it is, that’s where the EMV wants
to land.”

“Is it safe?”

| grinned at him. “Nothing in life’s safe.” | let the car have
its head and we dropped to a small, open platform below the
building’s spire. We got out and stood on the cracked
balcony. It was quite dark except for the few building lights
far below and the stars. A few paces away, a vague blue
glow outlined a farcaster portal where elevator doors may
once have been.

“PIL go first,” | said but Johnny had already stepped
through. | palmed the borrowed stunner and followed him.

I'd never been in the Shrike Temple on Lusus before but
there was no doubt that we were there now. Johnny stood a
few paces ahead of me but other than him there was no one
around. The place was cool and dark and cavernous if
caverns could really be that large. A frightening polychrome
sculpture which hung from invisible cables rotated to unfelt
breezes. Johnny and | both turned as the farcaster portal
winked out of existence.

“Well, we did their work for them, didn’t we?” | whispered
to Johnny. Even the whisper seemed to echo in the red-lit
hall. | hadn’t planned on Johnny ‘casting to the Temple with
me.

The light seemed to come up then, not really illuminating
the great hall but widening its scope so that we could see
the semicircle of men there. | remembered that some were

called exorcists and others lectors and there was some other
category | forgot. Whoever they were, it was alarming to see
them standing there, at least two dozen of them, their robes
variations on red and black and their high foreheads glowing
from the red light above. | had no trouble recognizing the
bishop. He was from my world, although shorter and fatter
than most of us, and his robe was very red.

| did not try to hide the stunner. It was possible that if they
all tried to rush us | could bring them all down. Possible but
not probable. | could not see any weapons but their robes
could have hidden entire arsenals.

Johnny walked toward the bishop and | followed. Ten paces
from the man we stopped. The bishop was the only one not
standing. His chair was made of wood and looked as if it
could be folded so that the intricate arms, supports, back,
and legs could be carried in a compact form. One couldn’t
say the same for the mass of muscle and fat evident under
the bishop’s robes.

Johnny took another step forward. “Why did you try to
kidnap my cybrid?” He spoke to the Shrike Cult holy man as
if the rest of us were not there.

The bishop chuckled and shook his head. “My
dear ... entity ... it is true that we wished your presence in
our place of worship, but you have no evidence that we were
involved in any attempt to kidnap you.”

“I’m not interested in evidence,” said Johnny. “I’m curious
as to why you want me here.”

| heard a rustling behind us and | swiveled quickly, the
stunner charged and pointed, but the broad circle of Shrike
priests remained motionless. Most were out of the stunner’s
range. | wished that | had brought my father’s projectile
weapon with me.

The bishop’s voice was deep and textured and seemed to
fill the huge space. “Surely you know that the Church of the
Final Atonement has a deep and abiding interest in the
world of Hyperion.”

“Yes.”

“And surely you are aware that during the past several
centuries the persona of the Old Earth poet Keats has been
woven into the cultural mythos of the Hyperion colony?”

“Yes. So?”

The bishop rubbed his cheek with a large red ring on one
finger. “So when you offered to go on the Shrike Pilgrimage
we agreed. We were distressed when you reneged on this
offer.”

Johnny’s look of amazement was most human, “I offered?
When?”

“Eight local days ago,” said the bishop. “In this room. You
approached us with the idea.”

“Did | say why | wanted to go on the ... the Shrike
Pilgrimage?”

“You said that it was ... | believe the phrase you used
was ... ‘important for your education.’ We can show you the
recording if you wish. All such conversations in the Temple
are recorded. Or you may have a duplicate of the recording
to view at your own convenience.”

“Yes,” said Johnny.

The bishop nodded and an acolyte or whatever the hell he
was disappeared into the gloom for a moment and returned
with a standard video chip in his hand. The bishop nodded
again and the black-robed man came forward and handed
the chip to Johnny. | kept the stunner ready until the guy
had returned to the semicircle of watchers.

“Why did you send the goondas after us?” | asked. It was
the first time I’d spoken in front of the bishop and my voice
sounded too loud and too raw.

The Shrike holy man made a gesture with one pudgy
hand. “M. Keats had expressed an interest in joining our
holiest pilgrimage. Since it is our belief that the Final
Atonement is drawing closer each day, this is of no little
importance to us. Consequently, our agents reported that M.
Keats may have been the victim of one or more assaults and

that a certain private investigator ... you, M. Lamia ... was
responsible for destroying the cybrid bodyguard provided M.
Keats by the TechnoCore.”

“Bodyguard!” It was my turn to sound amazed.

“Of course,” said the bishop. He turned toward Johnny.
“The gentleman with the queue who was recently murdered
on the Templar Excursion, was this not the same man whom
you introduced as your bodyguard a week earlier? He is
visible in the recording.”

Johnny said nothing. He seemed to be straining to
remember something.

“At any rate,” continued the bishop, “we must have your
answer about the pilgrimage before the week is out. The
Sequoia Sempervirens departs from the Web in nine local
days.”

“But that’s a Templar treeship,
make the long leap to Hyperion.”

The bishop smiled. “In this case it does. We have reason to
believe that this may be the last Church-sponsored
pilgrimage and we have chartered the Templar craft to allow
as many of the faithful as possible to make the trip.” The
bishop gestured and red-and-black-robed men faded back
into darkness. Two exorcists came forward to fold his stool as
the bishop stood. “Please give us your answer as soon as
possible.” He was gone. The remaining exorcist stayed to
show us out.

There were no more farcasters. We exited by the main door
of the Temple and stood on the top step of the long
staircase, looking down on the Concourse Mall of Hive
Center and breathing in the cool, oil-scented air.

”

said Johnny. “They don’t

My father’s automatic was in the drawer where I'd left it. |
made sure there was a full load of flechettes, palmed the
magazine back in, and carried the weapon into the kitchen
where breakfast was cooking. Johnny sat at the long table,

staring down through gray windows at the loading dock. |
carried the omelets over and set one in front of him. He
looked up as | poured the coffee.

“Do you believe him?” | asked. “That it was your idea?”

“You saw the video recording.”

“Recordings can be faked.”

“Yes. But this one wasn’t.”

“Then why did you volunteer to go on this pilgrimage?
And why did your bodyguard try to kill you after you talked
to the Shrike Church and the Templar captain?”

Johnny tried the omelet, nodded, and took another forkful.
“The ... bodyguard ... is a complete unknown to me. He must
have been assigned to me during the week lost to memory.
His real purpose obviously was to make sure that | did not
discover something ... or, if | did stumble upon it, to
eliminate me.”

“Something in the Web or in datumplane?”

“In the Web, | presume.”

“We need to know who he... it ... worked for and why they
assigned him to you.”

“I do know,” said Johnny. “I just asked. The Core responds
that | requested a bodyguard. The cybrid was controlled by
an Al nexus which corresponds to a security force.”

“Ask why he tried to kill you.”

“| did. They emphatically deny that such a thing is
possible.”

“Then why was this so-called bodyguard slinking around
after you a week after the murder?”

“They respond that while | did not request security again
after my ... discontinuity ... the Core authorities felt that it
would be prudent to provide protection.”

| laughed. “Some protection. Why the hell did he run on
the Templar world when | caught up to him? They aren’t
even trying to give you a plausible story, Johnny.”

“No.”

“Nor did the bishop explain how the Shrike Church had
farcaster access to Old Earth ... or whatever you call that
stage-set world.”

“And we did not ask.”

“| didn’t ask because | wanted to get out of that damn
Temple in one piece.”

Johnny didn’t seem to hear. He was sipping his coffee, his
gaze focused somewhere else.

“What?” | said.

He turned to look at me, tapping his thumbnail on his
lower lip. “There is a paradox here, Brawne.”

“What?”
“If it was truly my aim to go to Hyperion ... for my cybrid
to travel there ... | could not have remained in the

TechnoCore. | would have had to invest all consciousness in
the cybrid itself.”

“Why?” But even as | asked | saw the reason.

“Think. Datumplane itself is an abstract. A commingling of
computer and Al-generated dataspheres and the quasi-
perceptual Gibsonian matrix designed originally for human
operators, now accepted as common ground for man,
machine, and Al.”

“But Al hardware exists, somewhere in real space,” | said.
“Somewhere in the TechnoCore.

“Yes, but that is irrelevant to the function of Al
consciousness,” said Johnny. “I can ‘be’ anywhere the
overlapping dataspheres allow me to travel ... all of the Web
worlds, of course, datumplane, and any of the TechnoCore
constructs such as Old Earth ... but it’s only within that
milieu that | can claim ‘consciousness’ or operate sensors or
remotes such as this cybrid.”

| set my coffee cup down and stared at the thing | had
loved as a man during the night just past. “Yes?”

“The colony worlds have limited dataspheres,” said Johnny.
“While there is some contact with the TechnoCore via fatline
transmissions, it is an exchange of data only ... rather like

the First Information Age computer interfaces ... rather than
a flow of consciousness. Hyperion’s datasphere is primitive
to the point of nonexistence. And from what | can access,
the Core has no contact whatsoever with that world.”

“Would that be normal?” | asked. “I mean with a colony
world that far away?”

“No. The Core has contact with every colony world, with
such interstellar barbarians as the Ousters, and with other
sources the Hegemony could not imagine.”

| sat stunned. “With the Ousters?” Since the war on
Bressia a few years earlier, the Ousters had been the Web’s
prime bogeymen. The idea of the Core ... the same
congregation of Als which advises the Senate and the All
Thing and which allow our entire economy, farcaster system,
and technological civilization to run ... the idea of the Core
being in touch with the Ousters was frightening. And what
the hell did Johnny mean by “other sources”? | didn’t really
want to know right then.

“But you said it is possible for your cybrid to travel there?”
| said. “What did you mean by ‘investing all consciousness’
in your cybrid? Can an Al become ... human? Can you exist
only in your cybrid?”

“It has been done,” Johnny said softly. “Once. A personality
reconstruction not too different from my own. A twentieth-
century poet named Ezra Pound. He abandoned his Al
persona and fled from the Web in his cybrid. But the Pound
reconstruction was insane.”

“Or sane,” | said.

“Yes.”

“So all of the data and personality of an Al can survive ina
cybrid’s organic brain.”

“Of course not, Brawne. Not one percent of one percent of
my total consciousness would survive the transition. Organic
brains can’t process even the most primitive information the
way we can. The resultant personality would not be the Al
persona ... neither would it be a truly human consciousness

or cybrid ...” Johnny stopped in mid-sentence and turned
quickly to look out the window.

After a long minute | said, “What is it?” | reached out a
hand but did not touch him.

He spoke without turning. “Perhaps | was wrong to say that
the consciousness would not be human,” he whispered. “It is
possible that the resulting persona could be human touched
with a certain divine madness and meta-human perspective.
It could be ... if purged of all memory of our age, of all
consciousness of the Core ... it could be the person the
cybrid was programmed to be....”

“John Keats,” | said.

Johnny turned away from the window and closed his eyes.
His voice was hoarse with emotion. It was the first time | had
heard him recite poetry:

“Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
A paradise for a sect, the savage too

From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
Guesses at Heaven; pity these have not

Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf

The shadows of melodious utterance.

But bare of laurel they live, dream, and die;

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,

With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm

And dumb enchantment Who alive can say,
Thou art no Poet—mayst not tell thy dreams?
Since every man whose soul is not a clod

Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved,
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse
Be Poet’s or Fanatics will be known

When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.”

“| don’t get it,” | said. “What does it mean?”

“It means,” said Johnny, smiling gently, “that | know what
decision | made and why | made it. | wanted to cease being a
cybrid and become a man. | wanted to go to Hyperion. | still
do.”

“Somebody killed you for that decision a week ago,” | said.

“Yes.”

“And you're going to try again?”

“Yes.”

“Why not invest consciousness in your cybrid here?
Become human in the Web?”

“It would never work,” said Johnny. “What you see as a
complex interstellar society is only a small part of the Core
reality matrix. | would be constantly confronted with and at
the mercy of the Als. The Keats persona ... reality ... would
never survive.”

“All right,” | said, “you need to get out of the Web. But
there are other colonies. Why Hyperion?”

Johnny took my hand. His fingers were long and warm and
strong. “Don’t you see, Brawne? There is some connection
here. It may well be that Keats’s dreams of Hyperion were
some sort of transtemporal communication between his then
persona and his now persona. If nothing else, Hyperion is
the key mystery of our age—physical and poetic—and it is
quite probable that he ... that was born, died, and was born
again to explore it.”

“It sounds like madness to me,” | said. “Delusions of
grandeur.”

“Almost certainly,” laughed Johnny. “And | never have
been happier!” He grabbed my arms and brought me to my
feet, his arms around me. “Will you go with me, Brawne? Go
with me to Hyperion?”

| blinked in surprise, both at his question and the answer,
which filled me like a rush of warmth. “Yes,” | said. “I'll go.”

We went into the sleeping area then and made love the
rest of that day, sleeping finally to awaken to the low light of
Shift Three in the industrial trench outside. Johnny was lying

on his back, his hazel eyes open and staring at the ceiling,
lost in thought. But not so lost he did not smile and put his
arm around me. I nestled my cheek against him, settling into
the small curve where shoulder meets chest, and went back
to sleep.

| was wearing my best clothes—a suit of black whipcord, a
blouse woven of Renaissance silk with a Carvnel bloodstone
at the throat, a cocked Eulin Bré tricorne—when Johnny and
| farcast to TC2 the next day. | left him in the wood and brass
bar near the central terminex, but not before | slid Dad’s
automatic across to him in a paper bag and told him to shoot
anyone who even looked cross-eyed at him.

“Web English is such a subtle tongue,” he said.

“That phrase is older than the Web,” | said. “Just do it.” |
squeezed his hand and left without looking back.

| took a skycab to the Administration Complex and walked
my way through about nine security checks before they let
me into the Center grounds. | walked the half klick across
Deer Park, admiring the swans in the nearby lake and the
white buildings oh the hilltop in the distance, and then there
were nine more checkpoints before a Center security woman
led me up the flagstoned path to Government House, a low,
graceful building set amid flower gardens and landscaped
hills. There was an elegantly furnished waiting room but |
barely had time to sit down on an authentic pre-Hegira de
Kooning before an aide appeared and ushered me into the
CEO’s private office.

Meina Gladstone came around the desk to shake my hand
and show me to a chair. It was strange to see her in person
again after all those years of watching her on HTV. She was
even more impressive in the flesh: her hair was cut short but
seemed to be blowing back in gray-white waves; her cheeks
and chin were as sharp and Lincolnesque as all the history-
prone pundits insisted, but it was the large, sad, brown eyes

(which dominated the face and made one feel as if he or she
were in the presence of a truly original person.

| found that my mouth was dry. “Thank you for seeing me,
M. Executive. | know how busy you are.”

“I’m never too busy to see you, Brawne. Just as your father
was never too busy to see me when | was a junior senator.”

| nodded. Dad had once described Meina Gladstone as the
only political genius in the Hegemony. He knew that she
would be CEO someday despite her late start in politics. |
wished Dad had lived to see it.

“How is your mother, Brawne?”

“She’s well, M. Executive. She rarely leaves our old
summer place on Freeholm anymore but | see her every
Christmas Fest.”

Gladstone nodded. She had been sitting casually on the
edge of a massive desk which the tabloids said had once
belonged to an assassinated President—not Lincoln—of the
pre-Mistake USA, but now she smiled and went around to
the simple chair behind it. “I miss your father, Brawne. | wish
he were in this administration. Did you see the lake when
you came in?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember sailing toy boats there with my Kresten
when you were both toddlers?”

“Just barely, M. Executive. | was pretty young.”

Meina Gladstone smiled. An intercom chimed but she
waved it into silence. “How can | help you, Brawne?”

| took a breath. “M. Executive, you may be aware that I’m
working as an independent private investigator ...” | didn’t
wait for her nod. “A case I’ve been working on recently has
led me back to Dad’s suicide ...”

“Brawne, you know that was investigated most thoroughly.
| saw the commission’s report.”

“Yeah,” | said. “I did too. But recently I’ve discovered some
very strange things about the TechnoCore and its attitude
toward the world Hyperion. Weren’t you and Dad working on

a bill that would have brought Hyperion into the Hegemony
Protectorate?”

Gladstone nodded. “Yes, Brawne, but there were over a
dozen other colonies being considered that year. None were
allowed in.”

“Right. But did the Core or the Al Advisory Council take a
special interest in Hyperion.”

The CEO tapped a stylus against her lower lip. “What kind
of information do you have, Brawne?” | started to answer but
she held up a blunt finger. “Wait!” She keyed an interactive.
“Thomas, l'Il be stepping out for a few minutes. Please be
sure that the Sol Draconi trade delegation is entertained if |
fall a bit behind schedule.”

| didn’t see her key anything else but suddenly a blue and
gold farcaster portal hummed into life near the far wall. She
gestured me to go through first.

A plain of gold, knee-high grass stretched to horizons
which seemed farther away than most. The sky was a pale
yellow with burnished copper streaks which may have been
clouds. | didn’t recognize the world.

Meina Gladstone stepped through and touched the comlog
design on her sleeve. The farcaster portal winked out. A
warm breeze blew spice scents to us.

Gladstone touched her sleeve again, glanced skyward,
and nodded. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Brawne.
Kastrop-Rauxel has no datasphere or sats of any kind. Now
please go ahead with what you were saying. What kind of
information have you come across?”

| looked around at the empty grasslands. “Nothing to
warrant this security ... probably. I’ve just discovered that
the TechnoCore seems very interested in Hyperion. They’ve
also built some sort of analog to Old Earth ... an entire
world!”

If | expected shock or surprise | was disappointed.
Gladstone nodded. “Yes. We know about the Old Earth
analog.”

| was shocked. “Then why hasn’t it ever been announced?
If the Core can rebuild Old Earth, a lot of people would be
interested.”

Gladstone began walking and | strolled with her, walking
faster to keep up with her long-legged strides. “Brawne, it
would not be in the Hegemony’s interest to announce such a
thing. Our best human intelligence sources have no idea
why the Core is doing such a thing. They have offered no
insight. The best policy now is to wait. What information do
you have about Hyperion?”

| had no idea whether | could trust Meina Gladstone, old
times or not. But | knew that if | was going to get information
| would have to give some, “They built an analog
reconstruction of an Old Earth poet,” | said, “and they seem
obsessed with keeping any information about Hyperion
away from him.”

Gladstone picked a long stem of grass and sucked on it.
“The John Keats cybrid.”

“Yes.” | was careful not to show surprise this time. “Il know
that Dad was pushing hard to get Protectorate status for
Hyperion. If the Core has some special interest in the place,
they may have had something to do ... may have
manipulated ...”

“His apparent suicide?”

“Yeah.”

The wind moved gold grass in waves. Something very
small scurried away in the stalks at our feet. “It is not
beyond the realm of possibility, Brawne. But there was
absolutely no evidence. Tell me what this cybrid is going to
do.”

“First tell me why the Core is so interested in Hyperion.”

The older woman spread her hands. “If we knew that,
Brawne, | would sleep much easier nights. As far as we
know, the TechnoCore has been obsessed with Hyperion for
centuries. When CEO Yevshensky allowed King Billy of
Asquith to recolonize the planet, it almost precipitated a

true secession of Als from the Web. Recently the
establishment of our fatline transmitter there brought about
a Similar crisis.”

“But the Als didn’t secede.”

“No, Brawne, it appears that, for whatever reason, they
need us almost as badly as we need them.”

“But if they’re so interested in Hyperion, why don’t they
allow it into the Web so they can go there themselves?”

Gladstone ran a hand through her hair. The bronze clouds
far above rippled in what must be a fantastic jet stream.
“They are adamant about Hyperion not being admitted to
the Web,” she said. “It is an interesting paradox. Tell me
what the cybrid is going to do.”

“First tell me why the Core is obsessed with Hyperion.”

“We do not know for sure.”

“Best guess then.”

CEO Gladstone removed the stem of grass from her mouth
and regarded it. “We believe that the Core is embarked on a
truly incredible project which would allow them to
predict ... everything. To handle every variable of space,
time, and history as a quantum of manageable information.”

“Their Ultimate Intelligence Project,” | said, knowing that |
was being careless and not caring.

This time CEO Gladstone did register shock. “How do you
know about that?”

“What does that project have to do with Hyperion?”

Gladstone sighed. “We don’t know for sure, Brawne. But
we do know that there is an anomaly on Hyperion which
they have not been able to factor into their predictive
analyses. Do you know about the so-called Time Tombs that
the Shrike Church holds holy?”

“Sure. They’ve been off limits to tourists for a while.”

“Yes. Because of an accident to a researcher there a few
decades ago, our scientists have confirmed that the anti-
entropic fields around the Tombs are not merely a protection
against time’s erosive effects as has been widely believed.”

“What are they?”

“The remnants of a field ... or force ... which has actually
propelled the Tombs and their contents backward in time
from some distant future.”

“Contents?” | managed. “But the Tombs are empty. Ever
since they were discovered.”

“Empty now,” said Meina Gladstone. “But there is
evidence that they were full ... will be full ... when they
open. In our near future.”

| stared at her. “How near?”

Her dark eyes remained soft but the movement of her
head was final. “I’ve told you too much already, Brawne. You
are forbidden to repeat it. We'll ensure that silence if
necessary.”

| hid my own confusion by finding a piece of grass to strip
for chewing. “All right,” | said. “What’s going to come out of
the Tombs? Aliens? Bombs? Some sort of reverse time
capsules?”

Gladstone smiled tightly. “If we knew that, Brawne, we
would be ahead of the Core, and we are not.” The smile
disappeared. “One hypothesis is that the Tombs relate to
some future war. A settling of future scores by rearranging
the past, perhaps.”

“A war between who, for Chrissakes?”

She opened her hands again. “We need to be getting
back, Brawne. Would you please tell me what the Keats
cybrid is going to do now?”

| looked down and then back up to meet her steady gaze. |
couldn’t trust anyone, but the Core and the Shrike Church
already knew Johnnys plans. If this was a three-sided game,
perhaps each side should know in case there was a good guy
in the bunch. “He’s going to invest all consciousness in the
cybrid,” | said rather clumsily. “He’s going to become
human, M. Gladstone, and then go to Hyperion. I’m going
with him.”

The CEO of the Senate and All Thing, chief officer for a
government which spanned almost two hundred worlds and
billions of people, stared at me in silence for a long moment.
Then she said, “He plans to go with the Templar ship on the
pilgrimage then.”

“Yes.”

“No,” said Meina Gladstone.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the Sequoia Sempervirens will not be allowed
to leave Hegemony space. There will be no pilgrimage
unless the Senate decides it is in ourinterest.” Her voice was
iron-hard.

“Johnny and l'Il go by spinship,” | said. “The pilgrimage is
a loser’s game anyway.”

“No,” she said. “There will be no more civilian spinships to
Hyperion for some time.”

The word “civilian” tipped me. “War?”

Gladstone’s lips were tight. She nodded. “Before most
spinships could reach the region.”

“A war with ... the Ousters?”

“Initially. View it as a way to force the issue between the
TechnoCore and ourselves, Brawne. We will either have to
incorporate the Hyperion system into the Web to allow it
FORCE protection, or it will fall to a race which despises and
distrusts the Core and all Als.”

| didn’t mention Johnny’s comment that the Core had been
in touch with the Ousters. | said, “A way to force the issue.
Fine. But who manipulated the Ousters into attacking?”

Gladstone looked at me. If her face was Lincolnesque at
that moment, then Old Earth’s Lincoln was one tough son of
a bitch. “It’s time to get back, Brawne. You appreciate how
important it is that none of this information gets out.”

“| appreciate the fact that you wouldn’t have told me
unless you had a reason to,” | said. “I don’t know who you
want the stuff to go to, but | know I’m a messenger, not a
confidante.”

“Don’t underestimate our resolve to keep this classified,
Brawne.”

| laughed. “Lady, | wouldn’t underestimate your resolve in
anything.”

Meina Gladstone gestured for me to step through the
farcaster portal first.

“| Know a way we can discover what the Core is up to,”
said Johnny as we rode alone in a rented jetboat on Mare
Infinitus. “But it would be dangerous.”

“So what else is new?”

“I’m serious. We should only attempt it if we feel that it is
imperative to understand what the Core fears from
Hyperion.”

“| do.”

“We will need an operative. Someone who is an artist in
datum-plane operations. Someone smart but not so smart
that they won’t take a chance. And someone who would risk
everything and keep the secret just for the ultimate in
cyberpuke pranks.”

| grinned at Johnny. “I’ve got just the man.”

BB lived alone in a cheap apartment at the base of a
cheap tower in a cheap TC2 neighborhood. But there was
nothing cheap about the hardware that filled most of the
Space in the four-room flat. Most of BB’s salary for the past
standard decade had gone into state-of-the-art cyberpuke
toys.

| started by saying that we wanted him to do something
illegal. BB said that, as a public employee, he couldn’t
consider such a thing. He asked what the thing was. Johnny
began to explain. BB leaned forward and | saw the old
cyberpuke gleam in his eyes from our college days. | half
expected him to try to dissect Johnny right there just to see

how a cybrid worked. Then Johnny got to the interesting part
and BB’s gleam turned into a sort of green glow.

“When | self-destruct my Al persona,” said Johnny, “the
shift to cybrid consciousness will take only nanoseconds, but
during that time my section of the Core perimeter defenses
will drop. The security phages will fill the gap before too
many more nanoseconds pass, but during that time...”

“Entry to the Core,” whispered BB, his eyes glowing like
some antique VDT.

“It would be very dangerous,” stressed Johnny. “To my
knowledge, no human operator has ever penetrated Core
periphery.”

BB rubbed his upper lip. “There’s a legend that Cowboy
Gibson did it before the Core seceded,” he mumbled. “But
nobody believes it. And Cowboy disappeared.”

“Even if you penetrate,” said Johnny, “there would be
insufficient time to access except for the feet that | have the
data coordinates.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” whispered BB. He turned back to his
console and reached for his shunt. “Let’s do it.”

“Now?” | said. Even Johnny looked taken aback.

“Why wait?” BB clicked in his shunt and attached
metacortex leads, but left the deck idling. “Are we doing
this, or what?”

| went over next to Johnny on the couch and took his hand.
His skin was cool. He showed no expression now but | could
imagine what it must be like to be facing imminent
destruction of one’s personality and previous existence.
Even if the transfer worked, the human with the John Keats
persona would not be “Johnny.”

“He’s right,” said Johnny. “Why wait?”

| kissed him. “All right,” | said. “I’m going in with BB.”

“No!” Johnny squeezed my hand. “You can’t help and the
danger would be terrible.”

| heard my own voice, as implacable as Meina Gladstone’s.
“Perhaps. But | can’t ask BB to do this if | won’t. And | won’t

leave you in there alone.” | squeezed his hand a final time
and went over to sit by BB at the console. “How do I connect
with this fucking thing, BB?”

° e ka

You’ve read all the cyberpuke stuff. You know all about the
terrible beauty of datumplane, the three-dimensional
highways with their landscapes of black ice and neon
perimeters and Day-Glo Strange Loops and shimmering
skyscrapers of data blocks under hovering clouds of Al
presence. | saw all of it riding piggyback on BB’s carrier
wave. It was almost too much. Too intense. Too terrifying. |
could hear the black threats of the hulking security phages;
| could sme// death on the breath of the counterthrust
tapeworm viruses even through the ice screens; | could fee/
the weight of the Als’ wrath above us—we were insects
under elephants’ feet—and we hadn’t even done anything
yet except travel approved dataways on a logged-in access
errand BB had dreamed up, some homework stuff for his
Flow Control Records and Statistics job.

And | was wearing stick-on leads, seeing things in a
datumplane version of fuzzy black and white TV while
Johnny and BB were viewing full stimsim holo, as it were.

| don’t know how they took it.

“OK,” whispered BB in some datumplane equivalent of a
whisper, “we're here.”

“Where?” All | saw was an infinite maze of bright lights
and even brighter shadows, ten thousand cities arrayed in
four dimensions.

“Core periphery,” whispered BB. “Hang on. It’s about
time.”

| had no arms to hang on to and nothing physical in this
universe to grasp, but | concentrated on the waveform
shades that were our data truck and clung.

Johnny died then.

lve seen a nuclear explosion firsthand. When Dad was a
senator he took Mom and me to Olympus Command School
to see a FORCE demonstration. For the last course the
audience viewing pod was farcast to some godforsaken
world ... Armaghast, | think ... and a FORCE:ground recon
platoon fired a clean tactical nuke at a pretend adversary
some nine klicks away. The viewing pod was shielded with a
class ten containment field, polarized, the nuke only a fifty-
kiloton field tactical, but l'Il never forget the blast, the shock
wave rocking the eighty-ton pod like a leaf on its repellers,
the physical shock of light so obscenely bright that it
polarized our field to midnight and still brought tears to our
eyes and clamored to get in.

This was worse.

A section of datumplane seemed to flash and then to
implode on itself, reality flushed down a drain of pure black.

“Hang on!” BB screamed against datumplane static that
rasped at my bones and we were whirling, tumbling, sucked
into the vacuum like insects in an oceanic vortex.

Somehow, incredibly, impossibly, black-armored phages
thrust toward us through the din and madness. BB avoided
one, turned the others acid membranes against itself. We
were being sucked into something colder and blacker than
any void in our reality could ever be.

“There!” called BB, his voice analog almost lost in the
tornado rush of ripping datasphere.

There what? Then | saw it: a thin line of yellow rippling in
the turbulence like a cloth banner in a hurricane. BB rolled
us, found our own wave to carry us against the storm,
matched coordinates that danced past me too quickly to
see, and we were riding the yellow band into ...

. Into what? Frozen fountains of fireworks. Transparent
mountain ranges of data, endless glaciers of ROMworks,
access ganglia spreading like fissures, iron clouds of
semisentient internal process bubbles, glowing pyramids of

primary source stuff, each guarded by lakes of black ice and
armies of black-pulse phages.

“Shit,” | whispered to no one in particular.

BB followed the yellow band down, in, through. | felt a
connection as if someone had suddenly given us a great
mass to carry.

“Got it!” screamed BB, and suddenly there was a sound
louder and larger than the maelstrom of noise surrounding
and consuming us. It was neither klaxon nor siren, but it was
both in its tone of warning and aggression.

We were climbing out of it all. | could see a vague wall of
gray through the brilliant chaos and somehow knew it to be
the periphery, the vacuum dwindling but still breaching the
wall like a shrinking black stain. We were climbing out.

But not quickly enough.

The phages hit us from five sides. During the twelve years
I’ve been an investigator I’ve been shot once, knifed twice.
I’ve had more than this one rib broken. This hurt more than
all that combined. BB was fighting and climbing at the same
time.

My contribution to the emergency was to scream. | felt
cold claws on us, pulling us down, back into the brightness
and noise and chaos. BB was using some program, some
formula of enchantment to fight them off. But not enough. |
could feel the blows slamming home—not against me
primarily, but connecting to the matrix analog that was BB.

We were sinking back. Inexorable forces had us in tow.
Suddenly | felt Johnny’s presence and it was as if a huge,
strong hand had scooped us up, lifted us through the
periphery wall an instant before the stain snapped our
lifeline to existence and the defensive field crashed together
like steel teeth.

We moved at impossible soeed down congested dataways,
passing datumplane couriers and other operator analogs like
an EMV ripping past oxcarts. Then we were approaching a

Slow-time gate, leapfrogging gridlocked exiting operator
analogs in some four-dimensional high jump.

| felt the inevitable nausea of transition as we came up out
of the matrix. Light burned my retinas. Rea/ light. Then the
pain washed in and | slumped over the console and groaned.

“Come on, Brawne.” It was Johnny—or someone just like
Johnny—helping me to my feet and moving us both toward
the door.

“BB,” | gasped.

“No.”

| opened aching eyes long enough to see BB Surbringer
draped across his console. His Stetson had fallen off and
rolled to the floor. BB’s head had exploded, spattering most
of the console with gray and red. His mouth was open and a
thick white foam still issued from it. It looked like his eyes
had melted.

Johnny caught me, half lifted me. “We have to go,” he
whispered. “Someone will be here any minute.”

| closed my eyes and let him take me away from there.

° è ka

| awoke to dim red light and the sound of water dripping. |
smelled sewage, mildew, and the ozone of uninsulated
fiberoptic cables. | opened one eye.

We were in a low space more cave than room with cables
snaking from a shattered ceiling and pools of water on the
slime-caked tiles. The red light came from somewhere
beyond the cave—a maintenance access shaft perhaps, or
automech tunnel. | moaned softly. Johnny was there, moving
from the rough bedroll of blankets to my side. His face was
darkened with grease or dirt and there was at least one fresh
cut.

“Where are we?”

He touched my cheek. His other arm went around my
shoulders and helped me to a sitting position. The awful
view shifted and tilted and for a moment | thought | was

going to be sick. Johnny helped me drink water from a
plastic tumbler.

“Dregs’ Hive,” said Johnny.

I'd guessed even before | was fully conscious. Dregs’ Hive
is the deepest pit on Lusus, a no man’s land of mech tunnels
and illegal burrows occupied by half the Web’s outcasts and
outlaws. It was in Dregs’ Hive that I’d been shot several
years ago and still bore the laser scar above my left hipbone.

| held the tumbler out for more water. Johnny fetched
some from a steel therm and came back. | panicked for a
second as | fumbled in my tunic pocket and on my belt:
Dad’s automatic was gone. Johnny held the weapon up and |
relaxed, accepting the cup and drinking thirstily. “BB?” |
said, hoping for a moment that it had all been a terrible
hallucination.

Johnny shook his head. “There were defenses that neither
of us had anticipated. BB’s incursion was brilliant, but he
couldn't outfight Core omega phages. But half the operators
in datumplane felt echoes of the battle. BB is already the
stuff of legend.”

“Fucking great,” | said and gave a laugh that sounded
suspiciously like the beginning of a sob. “The stuff of legend.
And BB's dead. For fuck-all nothing.”

Johnny’s arm was tight around me. “Not for nothing,
Brawne. He made the grab. And passed the data to me
before he died.”

| managed to sit fully upright and to look at Johnny. He
seemed the same—the same soft eyes, same hair, same
voice. But something was subtly different, deeper. More
human? “You?” | said. “Did you make the transfer? Are
you ...”

“Human?” John Keats smiled at me. “Yes, Brawne. Or as
close to human as someone forged in the Core could ever
be.”

“But you remember ... me... BB... what’s happened.”

“Yes. And | remember first looking into Chapman’s Homer.
And my brother Tom’s eyes as he hemorrhaged in the night.
And Severn’s kind voice when | was too weak to open my
own eyes to face my fate. And our night in Piazza di Spagna
when | touched your lips and imagined Fanny’s cheek
against mine. | remember, Brawne.”

For a second | was confused, and then hurt, but then he
set his palm against my cheek and he touched me, there
was no one else, and | understood. | closed my eyes. “Why
are we here?” | whispered against his shirt.

“| couldn’t risk using a farcaster. The Core could trafce us
at once. | considered the spaceport but you were in no
condition to travel. | chose the Dregs’.”

| nodded against him. “They'll try to kill you.”

“Yes.”

“Are the local cops after us? The Hegemony police? Transit
cops?”

“No, | don’t think so. The only ones who've challenged us
so far were two bands of goondas and some of the Dregs’
dwellers.”

| opened my eyes. “What happened with the goondas?”
There were more deadly hoodlums and contract killers in the
Web but I’d never run across any.

Johnny held up Dad’s automatic and smiled.

“| don’t remember anything after BB,” | said.

“You were injured by the phage backlash. You could walk
but we were the caupe of more than a few odd looks in the
Concourse.”

“I bet. Tell me about what BB discovered. Why is the Core
obsessed with Hyperion?”

“Eat first,” said Johnny. “It’s been more than twenty-eight
hours.” He crossed the dripping width of the cave room and
returned with a self-heating packet. It was basic holo fanatic
fare—flash-dried and reheated cloned beef, potatoes which
had never seen soil, and carrots which looked like some sort
of deep-sea slugs. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

“OK,” | said, “tell me.”

“The TechnoCore has been divided into three groups for as
long as the Core has existed,” said Johnny. “The Stables are
the old-line Als, some of them dating back to pre-Mistake
days; at least one of them gained sentience in the First
Information Age. The Stables argue that a certain level of
symbiosis is necessary between humanity and the Core.
They’ve promoted the Ultimate Intelligence Project as a way
to avoid rash decisions, to delay until all variables can be
factored. The Volatiles are the force behind the Secession
three centuries ago. The Volatiles have done conclusive
studies that show how humankind’s usefulness is past and
from this point on human beings constitute a threat to the
Core. They advocate immediate and total extinction.”

“Extinction,” | said. After a moment | asked, “Can they do
it?”

“Of humans in the Web, yes,” said Johnny. “Core
intelligences not only create the infrastructure for
Hegemony society but are necessary for everything from
FORCE deployment to the failsafes on stockpiled nuclear
and plasma arsenals.”

“Did you know about this when you were ... in the Core?”

“No,” said Johnny. “As a pseudo-poet cybrid retrieval
project, | was a freak, a pet, a partial thing allowed to roam
the Web the way a pet is let out of the house each day. | had
no idea there were three camps of Al influence.”

“Three camps” | said. “What’s the third? And where does
Hyperion comp in?”

“Between the Stables and the Volatiles are the Ultimates.
For the past five centuries the Ultimates have been
obsessed with the UI Project. The existence or extinction of
the human race is of interest to them only in how it applies
to the project. To this date, they have been a force for
moderation, an ally of the Stables, because it is their

perception that such reconstruction and retrieval projects as
the Old Earth experiment are necessary to the culmination
of the Ul.

“Recently, however, the Hyperion issue has caused the
Ultimates to move toward the Volatiles’ views. Since
Hyperion was explored four centuries ago, the Core has been
concerned and nonplussed. It was immediately obvious that
the so-called Time Tombs were artifacts launched backward
in time from a point at least ten thousand years in the
galaxy’s future. More disturbing, however, is the fact that
Core predictive formulae have never been able to factor the
Hyperion variable.

“Brawne, to understand this, you must realize how much
the Core relies upon prediction. Already, without UI input,
the Core knows the details of the physical, human, and Al
future to a margin of 98.9995 percent for a period of at least
two centuries. The Al Advisory Council to the All Thing with
its vague, delphic utterances—considered so indispensable
by humans—is a joke. The Core drops tidbits of revelations
to the Hegemony when it serves the Core’s purposes—
sometimes to aid the Volatiles, sometimes the Stables, but
always to please the Ultimates.

“Hyperion is a rent in the entire predictive fabric of the
Core’s existence. It is the penultimate oxymoron—a
nonfactorable variable. Impossible as it seems, Hyperion
appears to be exempt from the laws of physics, history,
human psychology, and Al prediction as practiced by the
Core.

“The result has been two futures—two realities if you will—
one in which the Shrike scourge soon to be released on the
Web and interstellar humanity is a weapon from the Core-
dominated future, a retroactive first strike from the Volatiles
who rule the galaxy millennia hence. The other reality sees
the Shrike invasion, the coming interstellar war and the
other products of the Time Tombs’ opening as a human fist
struck back through time, a final, twilight effort by the

Ousters, ex-colonials, and other small bands of humans who
escaped the Volatiles’ extinction programs.”

° e ka

Water dripped on tile. Somewhere in the tunnels nearby a
mech cauterizer’s warning siren echoed from ceramic and
stone. | leaned against the wall and stared at Johnny.

“Interstellar war,” | said. “Both scenarios demand an
interstellar war?”

“Yes. There is no escaping that.”

“Can both Core groups be wrong in their prediction?”

“No. What happens on Hyperion is problematic, but the
disruption in the Web and elsewhere is quite clear. The
Ultimates use this knowledge as the prime argument for
hurrying the next step in Core evolution.”

“And what did BB’s stolen data show about us, Johnny?”

Johnny smiled, touched my hand, but did not hold it. “It
showed that | am somehow part of the Hyperion unknown.
Their creation of a Keats cybrid was a terrible gamble. Only
my apparent lack of success as a Keats analog allowed the
Stables to preserve me. When | made up my mind to go to
Hyperion, the Volatiles killed me with the clear intention of
obliterating my Al existence if my cybrid again made that
decision.”

“You did. What happened?”

“They failed. In the Core’s limitless arrogance, they failed
to take two things into account. First, that | might invest all
consciousness in my cybrid and thus change the nature of
the Keats analog. Second, that | would go to you.”

“Me!”

He took my hand. “Yes, Brawne. It seems that you also are
part of the Hyperion unknown.”

| shook my head. Realizing that there was a numbness in
my scalp above and behind my left ear, | raised my hand,
half expecting to find damage from the datumplane fight.

Instead, my fingers encountered the, plastic of a neural
shunt socket.

| jerked other hand from Johnny’s grasp and stared at him
in horror. He’d had me wired while | was unconscious.

Johnny held up both hands, palms toward me. “I had to,
Brawne. It may be necessary for the survival of both of us.”

| made a fist. “You fucking low-life son of a bitch. Why do |
need to interface directly, you lying bastard?”

“Not with the Core,” Johnny said softly. “With me.”

“You?” My arm and fist quivered with the anticipation of
Smashing his vat-cloned face. “You!” | sneered. “You're
human now, remember?”

“Yes. But certain cybrid functions remain. Do you
remember when | touched your hand several days ago and
brought us to datumplane?”

| stared at him. “I’m not going to datumplane again.”

“No. Nor am |. But | may need to relay incredible amounts
of data to you within a very short period of time. | brought
you to a black market surgeon in the Dregs’ last night. She
implanted a Schron disk.”

“Why?” The Schron loop was tiny, no larger than my
thumbnail, and very expensive. It held countless field-
bubble memories, each capable of holding near infinite bits
of information. Schron loops could not be accessed by the
biological carrier and thus were used for courier purposes. A
man or woman could carry Al personalities or entire
planetary dataspheres in a Schron loop. Hell, a dog could
carry all that.

“Why?” | said again, wondering if Johnny or some forces
behind Johnny were using me as such a courier. “Why?”

Johnny moved closer and put his hand around my fist.
“Trust me, Brawne.”

| don’t think I’d trusted anyone since Dad blew his brains
out twenty years ago and Mom retreated into the pure
selfishness of her seclusion. There was no reason in the
universe to trust Johnny now.

But | did.

| relaxed my fist and took his hand.

‘All right,” said Johnny. “Finish your meal and we'll get
busy trying to save our lives.”

Weapons and drugs were the two easiest things to buy in
Dregs’ Hive. We spent the last of Johnny’s considerable stash
of black marks to buy weapons.

By 2200 hours, we each wore whiskered titan-poly body
armor. Johnny had a goonda’s mirror-black helmet and | wore
a FORCE-surplus command mask. Johnny’s power gauntlets
were massive and a bright red. | wore osmosis gloves with
killing trim. Johnny carried an Ouster hellwhip captured on
Bressia and had tucked a laser wand in his belt. Along with
Dad’s automatic, | now carried a Steiner-Ginn mini-gun on a
gyroed waist brace. It was slaved to my command visor and |
could keep both hands free while firing.

Johnny and | looked at each other and began giggling.
When the laughter stopped there was a long silence.

“Are you sure the Shrike Temple here on Lusus is our best
chance?” | asked for the third or fourth time.

“We can’t farcast,” said Johnny. “All the Core has to do is
record a malfunction and we're dead. We can’t even take an
elevator from the lower levels. We'll have to find
unmonitored stairways and climb the hundred and twenty
floors. The best chance to make the Temple is straight down
the Concourse Mall.”

“Yes, but will the Shrike Church people take us in?”

Johnny shrugged, a strangely insectoid gesture in his
combat outfit. The voice through the goonda helmet was
metallic. “They’re the only group which has a vested interest
in our survival. And the only ones with enough political pull
to shield us from the Hegemony while finding transit for us
to Hyperion.”

| pushed up my visor. “Meina Gladstone said that no future
pilgrimage flights to Hyperion would be allowed.”

The dome of mirror black nodded judiciously. “Well, fuck
Meina Gladstone,” said my poet lover.

| took a breath and walked to the opening of our niche, our
cave, our last sanctuary. Johnny came up behind me. Body
armor rubbed against body armor. “Ready, Brawne?”

| nodded, brought the mini-gun around on its pivot, and
started to leave.

Johnny stopped me with a touch. “I love you. Brawne.”

| nodded, still tough. | forgot that my visor was up and he
could see my tears.

The Hive is awake all twenty-eight hours of the day, but
through some tradition, Third Shift was the quietest, the
least populated. We would have had a better chance at the
height of First Shift rush hour along the pedestrian
causeways. But if the goondas and thuggees were waiting
for us, the death toll of civilians would have been
staggering.

It took us more than three hours to climb our way to
Concourse Mall, not up a single staircase but along an
endless series of mech corridors, abandoned access verticals
swept clean by the Luddite riots eighty years ago, and a
final stairway that was more rust than metal. We exited onto
a delivery corridor less than half a klick from the Shrike
Temple.

“I can’t believe it was so easy,” | whispered to him on
intercom.

“They are probably concentrating people on the spaceport
and private farcaster clusters.”

We took the least exposed walkway onto the Concourse,
thirty meters below the first shopping level and four
hundred meters below the roof. The Shrike Temple was an
ornate, free-standing structure now less than half a klick

away. A few off-hour shoppers and joggers glanced at us and
then moved quickly away. | had no doubt that the Mall
police were being paged, but I’d be surprised if they showed
up too quickly.

A gang of brightly painted street thugs exploded from a
lift shaft, hollering and whooping. They carried pulse-knives,
chains, and power gauntlets. Startled, Johnny wheeled
toward them with the hellwhip sending out a score of
targeting beams. The mini-gun whir-whirred out of my
hands, shifting from aiming point to aiming point as | moved
my eyes.

The gang of seven kids skidded to a halt, held up their
hands, and backed away, eyes wide. They dropped into jthe
lift shaft and were gone.

| looked at Johnny. Black mirrors looked back. Neither of us
laughed.

We crossed to the northbound shopping lane. The few
pedestrians scurried for open shopfronts. We were less than
a hundred meters from the Temple stairs. | could actually
hear my heartbeat in the FORCE helmet earphones. We were
within fifty meters of the stairs. As if called, an acolyte or
priest of some sort appeared at the ten-meter door of the
Temple and watched us approach. Thirty meters. If anyone
was going to intercept us, they would have done it before
this.

| turned toward Johnny to say something funny. At least
twenty beams and half that many projectiles hit us at once.
The outer layer of the titan-poly exploded outward,
deflecting most of the projectile energy in the counterblast.
The mirrored surface beneath bounced most of the killing
light. Most of it.

Johnny was flung off his feet by the impact. | went to one
knee and let the mini-gun train on the laser source.

Ten stories up along the residential Hive wall. My visor
opaqued. Body armor burned off in a steam of reflective gas.
The mini-gun sounded precisely like the kind of chainsaw

they use in history holodramas. Ten stories up, a five-meter
section of balcony and wall disintegrated in a cloud of
explosive flechettes and armor-piercing rounds.

Three heavy slugs struck me from behind.

| landed on my palms, silenced the mini-gun, and
swiveled. There were at least a dozen of them on each level,
moving quickly in precise combat choreography. Johnny had
reached his knees and was firing the hellwhip in
orchestrated bursts of light, working his way through the
rainbow to beat bounce defenses.

One of the running figures exploded into flame as the
shopwindow behind it turned to molten glass and spattered
fifteen meters onto the Concourse. Two more men came up
over the level railings and I sent them back with a burst from
the mini-gun.

An open skimmer came down from the rafters, repellers
laboring as it banked around pylons. Rocket fire slammed
into concrete around Johnny and me. Shopfronts vomited a
billion shards of glass over us. | looked, blinked twice,
targeted, and fired. The skimmer lurched sideways, struck
an escalator with a dozen cowering civilians on it, and
tumbled in a mass of twisting metal and exploding
ordnance. | saw one shopper leap in flames to the Hive floor
eighty meters below.

“Left!” shouted Johnny over the tightbeam intercom.

Four men in combat armor had dropped from an upper
level using personal lift packs. The polymerized chameleon
armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but
only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant
kaleidoscope of reflections. One moved inside the sweep arc
of my mini-gun to neutralize me while the other three went
for Johnny.

He came in with a pulse-blade, ghetto style. | let it chew at
my armor, knowing it would get through to forearm flesh but
using it to buy the second | needed. | got it. I killed the man

with the rigid edge of my gauntlet and swept the mini-gun
fire into the three worrying Johnny.

Their armor went rigid and | used the gun to sweep them
backward like someone hosing down a littered sidewalk.
Only one of the men got to his feet before | blew them all off
the level overhang.

Johnny was down again. Parts of his chest armor were
gone, melted away. | smelled cooking flesh but saw no
mortal wounds. | half crouched, lifted him.

“Leave me, Brawne. Run. The stairs.” The tightbeam was
breaking up.

“Fuck off,” | said, getting my left arm around him enough
to support him while allowing room for the mini-gun to track.
“I’m still getting paid to be your bodyguard.”

They were Sniping at us from both walls of the Hive, the
rafters, and the shopping levels above us. | counted at least
twenty bodies on the walkways; about half were brightly
clad civilians. The power assist on the left leg of my armor
was grinding. Straight-legged, | awkwardly pulled us another
ten meters toward the Temple stairs. There were several
Shrike priests at the head of the stairs now, seemingly
oblivious to the gunfire all around them.

“Above!”

| swiveled, targeted, and fired in one moment, hearing the
gun go empty after one burst and seeing the second
skimmer get off its missiles in the instant before it became a
thousand pieces of hurtling, unrelated metal and torn flesh. |
dropped Johnny heavily to the pavement and fell on him,
trying to cover his exposed flesh with my body.

The missiles detonated simultaneously, several in airburst
and at least two burrowing. Johnny and | were lifted into the
air and hurled fifteen or twenty meters down the pitching
walkway. Good thing. The alloy and ferroconcrete pedestrian
strip where we had been a second before burned, bubbled,
sagged, and tumbled down onto the flaming walkway below.

There was a natural moat there now, a gap between most of
the other ground troops and us.

| rose, slapped away the useless mini-gun and mount,
pulled off useless shards of my own armor, and lifted Johnny
in both arms. His helmet had been blown off and his face
was very bad. Blood seeped through a score of gaps in his
armor. His right arm and left foot had been blown off. |
turned and began carrying him up the Shrike Temple stairs.

There were sirens and security skimmers filling the
Concourse flyspace now. The goondas on the upper levels
and far side of the tumbled walkway ran for cover. Two of the
commandos who had dropped on lift packs ran up the stairs
after me. | did not turn. | had to lift my straight and useless
left leg for every step. | knew that | had been seriously
burned on my back and side and there were shrapnel
wounds elsewhere.

The skimmers whooped and circled but avoided the
Temple steps. Gunfire rattled up and down the Mall. | could
hear metal-shod footsteps coming rapidly behind me. |
managed another three steps. Twenty steps above,
impossibly far away, the bishop stood amid a hundred
Temple priests.

| made another step and looked down at Johnny. One eye
was open, staring up at me. The other was closed with blood
and swollen tissue. “It’s all right,” | whispered, aware for the
first time that my own helmet was gone. “It’s all right. We’re
almost there.” | managed one more step.

The two men in bright black combat armor blocked my
way. Both had lifted visors streaked with deflection scars and
their faces were very hard.

“Put hifri down, bitch, and maybe we'll let you live.”

| nodded tiredly, too tired to take another step or do
anything but stand there and hold him in both arms.
Johnny’s blood dripped on white stone.

“| said, put the son of a bitch down and...”

| shot both of them, one in the left eye and one in the
right, never lifting Dad’s automatic from where | held it
under Johnny’s body.

They fell away. | managed another step. And then another.
| rested a bit and then lifted my foot for another.

At the top of the stairs the group of black and red robes
parted. The doorway was very tall and very dark. | did not
look back but | could hear from the noise behind us that the
crowd on the Concourse was very large. The bishop walked
by my side as | went through the doors and into the
dimness.

| laid Johnny on the cool floor. Robes rustled around us. |
pulled my own armor off where | could, then batted at
Johnny's. It was fused to his flesh in several places. | touched
his burned cheek with my good hand. “I’m sorry ...”

Johnny’s head stirred slightly and his eye opened. He lifted
his bare left hand to touch my cheek, my hair, the back of
my head. “Fanny ...”

| felt him die then. | also felt the surge as his hand found
the neural shunt, the white-light warmth of the surge to the
Schron loop as everything Johnny Keats ever was or would
be exploded into me; almost, almost it was like his orgasm
inside me two nights earlier, the surge and throb and
sudden warmth and stillness after, with the echo of
sensation there.

| lowered him to the floor and let the acolytes remove the
body, taking it out to show the crowd and the authorities
and the ones who waited to know.

| let them take me away.

| spent two weeks in a Shrike Temple recovery crèche.
Burns healed, scars removed, alien metal extracted, skin
grafted, flesh regrown, nerves rewoven. And still I hurt.

Everyone except the Shrike priests lost interest in me. The
Core made sure that Johnny was dead; that his presence in

the Core had left no trace; that his cybrid was dead.

The authorities took my statement, revoked my license,
and covered things up as best they could. The Web press
reported that a battle between Dregs’ Level Hive gangs had
erupted onto the Concourse Mall. Numerous gang members
and innocent bystanders were killed. The police contained it.

A week before word came that the Hegemony would allow
the Yggdrasill to sail with pilgrims for the war zone near
Hyperion, | used a Temple farcaster to ‘cast to Renaissance
Vector where I spent an hour alone in the archives there.

The papers were in vacuum-press so | could not touch
them. The handwriting was Johnny’s; | had seen his writing
before. The parchment was yellow and brittle with age.
There were two fragments. The first read:

The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone,
Bright eyes, accomplished shape, and languorous
waist!
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise—
Vanished unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday—or holinight—
Of fragrant-curtained love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight;
But, as I’ve read love’s missal through today,
He'll let me sleep, seeing | fast and pray.

The second fragment was in a wilder hand and on rougher
paper, as if slashed across a notepad in haste:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—

| hold it towards you.

I’m pregnant. | think that Johnny knew it. | don’t know for
sure.

I’m pregnant twice. Once with Johnny’s child and once
with the Schron-loop memory of what he was. | don’t know if
the two are meant to be linked. It will be months before the
child is born and only days before | face the Shrike.

But | remember those minutes after Johnny’s torn body
was taken out to the crowd and before | was led away for
help. They were all there in the darkness, hundreds of the
priests and acolytes and exorcists and ostiaries and
worshipers ... and as one voice they began to chant, there in
that red dimness under the revolving sculpture of the
Shrike, and their voices echoed in Gothic vaults. And what
they chanted went something like this:

“BLESSED BE SHE

BLESSED BE THE MOTHER OF OUR SALVATION
BLESSED BE THE INSTRUMENT OF OUR ATONEMENT
BLESSED BE THE BRIDE OF OUR CREATION
BLESSED BE SHE”

| was injured and in shock. | didn’t understand it then. |
don’t understand it now.

But | know that, when the time arrives and the Shrike
comes, Johnny and | will face it together.

It was long after dark. The tramcar rode between stars and
ice. The group sat in silence, the only sound the creak of

cable.

After a time had passed, Lenar Hoyt said to Brawne Lamia,
“You also carry the cruciform.”

Lamia looked at the priest.

Colonel Kassad leaned toward the woman. “Do you think
Het Masteen was the Templar who had spoken to Johnny?”

“Possibly,” said Brawne Lamia. “I never found out.”

Kassad did not blink. “Were you the one who killed
Masteen?”

“No.”

Martin Silenus stretched and yawned. “We have a few
hours before sunrise,” he said. “Anyone else interested in
getting some sleep?”

Several heads nodded.

“I'll stay up to keep watch,” said Fedmahn Kassad. “I’m not
tired.”

“I'll keep you company,” said the Consul.

“I'll heat some coffee for the therm,” said Brawne Lamia.

When the others slept, the infant Rachel making soft
cooing sounds in her sleep, the other three sat at the
windows and watched the stars burn cold and distant in the
high night.

Chronos Keep jutted from the easternmost rim of the great
Bridle Range: a grim, baroque heap of sweating stones with
three hundred rooms and halls, a maze of lightless corridors
leading to deep halls, towers, turrets, balconies overlooking
the northern moors, airshafts rising half a kilometer to light
and rumored to drop to the world’s labyrinth itself, parapets
scoured by cold winds from the peaks above, stairways—
inside and out—carved from the mountain stone and leading
nowhere, stained-glass windows a hundred meters tall set to
catch the first rays of solstice sun or the moon on midwinter
night, paneless windows the size of a man’s fist looking out
on nothing in particular, an endless array of bas-relief,
grotesque sculptures in half-hidden niches, and more than a
thousand gargoyles staring down from eave and parapet,
transept and sepulcher, peering down through wood rafters
in the great halls and positioned so as to peer in the blood-
tinted windows of the northeast face, their winged and
hunchbacked shadows moving like grim sundial hours, cast
by sunlight in the day and gas-fed torches at night. And
everywhere in Chronos Keep sign of the Shrike Church’s long
occupation—atonement altars draped in red velvet, hanging
and free-standing sculptures of the Avatar with polychrome
steel for blades and blood-gems for eyes, more statues of the
Shrike carved from the stone of narrow stairways and dark
halls so that nowhere in the night would one be free of the
fear of touching hands emerging from rock, the sharp curve
of blade descending from stone, four arms enveloping in a
final embrace. As if in a last measure of ornamentation, a
filigree of blood in many of the once occupied halls and

rooms, arabesques of red spattered in almost recognizable
patterns along walls and tunnel ceilings, bedclothes caked
hard with rust-red substance, and a central dining hall filled
with the stench of food rotting from a meal abandoned
weeks earlier, the floor and table, chairs and wall adorned
with blood, stained clothing and shredded robes lying in
mute heaps. And everywhere the sound of flies.

“Jolly fucking place, isn’t it?” said Martin Silenus, his voice
echoing.

Father Hoyt took several steps deeper into the great hall.
Afternoon light from the west-facing skylight forty meters
above fell in dusty columns. “It’s incredible,” he whispered.
“St. Peter’s in the New Vatican is nothing like this.”

Martin Silenus laughed. Thick light outlined his
cheekbones and satyr’s brows. “This was built for a /iving
deity,” he said.

Fedmahn Kassad lowered his travel bag to the floor and
cleared his throat. “Surely this place predates the Shrike
Church.”

“It does,” said the Consul. “But they’ve occupied it for the
past two centuries.”

“It doesn’t look too occupied now,” said Brawne Lamia.
She held her father’s automatic in her left hand.

They had all shouted during their first twenty minutes in
the Keep, but the dying echoes, silences, and buzz of flies in
the dining hall had reduced them to silence.

“Sad King Billy’s androids and bond clones built the
goddamn thing,” said the poet. “Eight local years of labor
before the spinships arrived. It was supposed to be the
greatest tourist resort in the Web, the jumping-off point for
the Time Tombs and the City of Poets. But | suspect that
even then the poor schmuck android laborers knew the
locals’ version of the Shrike story.”

Sol Weintraub stood near an eastern window, holding his
daughter up so that soft light fell across her cheek and
curled fist. “All that matters little now,” he said. “Lets find a

corner free of carnage where we can sleep and eat our
evening meal.”

“Are we going on tonight?” asked Brawne Lamia.

“To the Tombs?” asked Silenus, showing real surprise for
the first time on the voyage. “You'd go to the Shrike in the
dark?”

Lamia shrugged. “What difference does it make?”

The Consul stood near a leaded glass door leading to a
stone balcony and closed his eyes. His body still lurched and
balanced to the movement of the tramcar. The night and
day of travel above the peaks had blurred together in his
mind, lost in the fatigue of almost three days without sleep
and his rising tension. He opened his eyes before he dozed
off standing up. “We're tired,” he said. “We'll stay here
tonight and go down in the morning.”

Father Hoyt had gone out onto the narrow ledge of
balcony. He leaned on a railing of jagged stone. “Can we see
the Tombs from here?”

“No,” said Silenus. “They’re beyond that rise of hills. But
see those white things to the north and west a bit ... those
things gleaming like shards of broken teeth in the sand?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the City of Poets. King Billy’s original site for Keats
and for all things bright and beautiful. The locals say that
it’s haunted now by headless ghosts.”

“Are you one of them?” asked Lamia.

Martin Silenus turned to say something, looked a moment
at the pistol still in her hand, shook his head, and turned
away.

Footsteps echoed from an unseen curve of staircase and
Colonel Kassad reentered the room. “There are two small
storerooms above the dining hall,” he said. “They have a
section of balcony outside but no other access than this
stairway. Easy to defend. The rooms are ... clean.”

Silenus laughed. “Does that mean nothing can get at us or
that, when something does get at us, we'll have no way to

get out?”

“Where would we go?” asked Sol Weintraub.

“Where indeed?” said the Consul. He was very tired. He
lifted his gear and took one handle of the heavy Mobius
cube, waiting for Father Hoyt to lift the other end. “Let’s do
what Kassad says. Find a space to spend the night. Let’s at
least get out of this room. It stinks of death.”

Dinner was the last of their dried rations, some wine from
Silenus’s last bottle, and some stale cake which Sol
Weintraub had brought along to celebrate their last evening
together. Rachel was too little to eat the cake, but she took
her milk and went to sleep on her stomach on a mat near
her father.

Lenar Hoyt removed a small balalaika from his pack and
strummed a few chords.

“| didn’t know you played,” said Brawne Lamia.

“Poorly.”

The Consul rubbed his eyes. “I wish we had a piano.”

“You do have one,” said Martin Silenus.

The Consul looked at the poet.

“Bring it here,” said Silenus. “I’d welcome a Scotch.”

“What are you talking about?” snapped Father Hoyt.
“Make sense.”

“His ship,” said Silenus. “Do you remember our dear,
departed Voice of the Bush Masteen telling our Consul friend
that his secret weapon was that nice Hegemony singleship
sitting back at Keats Spaceport? Call it up, Your Consulship.
Bring it on in.”

Kassad moved away from the stairway where he had been
placing tripbeams. “The planet’s datasphere is dead. The
comsats are down. The orbiting FORCE ships are on
tightbeam. How is he supposed to call it?”

It was Lamia who spoke. “A fatline transmitter.”

The Consul moved his stare to her.

“Fatline transmitters are the size of buildings,” said
Kassad.

Brawne Lamia shrugged. “What Masteen said made sense.
If | were the Consul ... if | were one of the few thousand
individuals in the entire damn Web to own a singleship ... /’d
be damn sure | could fly it on remote if | needed it. The
planet’s too primitive to depend on its comm net, the
ionosphere’s too weak for shortwave, the comsats are the
first things to go in a skirmish ... I’d call it by fatline.”

“And the size?” said the Consul.

Brawne Lamia returned the diplomat’s level gaze. “The
Hegemony can’t yet build portable fatline transmitters.
There are rumors that the Ousters can.”

The Consul smiled. From somewhere there came a scrape
and then the sound of metal crashing.

“Stay here,” said Kassad. He removed a deathwand from
his tunic, canceled the tripbeams with his tactical comlog,
and descended from sight.

“| guess we're under martial law now,” said Silenus when
the Colonel was gone. “Mars ascendant.”

“Shut up,” said Lamia.

“Do you think it’s the Shrike?” asked Hoyt.

The Consul made a gesture. “The Shrike doesn’t have to
clank around downstairs. It can simply appear ... here.”

Hoyt shook his head. “I mean the Shrike that has been the
cause of everyone’s ... absence. The signs of slaughter here
in the Keep.”

“The empty villages might be the result of the evacuation
order,” said the Consul. “No one wants to stay behind to face
the Ousters. The SDF forces have been running wild. Much of
the carnage could be their doing.”

“With no bodies?” laughed Martin Silenus. “Wishful
thinking. Our absent hosts downstairs dangle now on the
Shrike’s steel tree. Where, ere long, we too will be.”

“Shut up,” Brawne Lamia said tiredly.

“And if | don’t,” grinned the poet, “will you shoot me,
madam?”

“Yes.”

The silence lasted until Colonel Kassad returned. He
reactivated the tripbeams and turned to the group seated on
packing crates and flowfoam cubes. “It was nothing. Some
carrion birds—harbingers, | think the locals call them—had
come in through the broken glass doors in the dining hall
and were finishing the feast.”

Silenus chuckled. “Harbingers. Very appropriate.”

Kassad sighed, sat on a blanket with his back to a crate,
and poked at his cold fobd. A single lantern brought from
the windwagon lighted the room and the shadows were
beginning to mount the walls in the corners away from the
door to the balcony. “It’s our last night,” said Kassad. “One
more story to tell.” He looked at the Consul.

The Consul had been twisting his slip of paper with the
number 7 scrawled on it. He licked his lips. “What’s the
purpose? The purpose of the pilgrimage has been destroyed
already.”

The others stirred.

“What do you mean?” asked Father Hoyt.

The Consul crumpled the paper and threw it into a corner.
“For the Shrike to grant a request, the band of pilgrims must
constitute a prime number. We had seven.
Masteen’s ... disappearance ... reduces us to six. We go to
our deaths now with no hope of a wish being granted.”

“Superstition,” said Lamia.

The Consul sighed and rubbed his brow. “Yes. But that is
our final hope.”

Father Hoyt gestured toward the sleeping infant. “Can’t
Rachel be our seventh?”

Sol Weintraub rubbed his beard. “No. A pilgrim must come
to the Tombs of his or her own free will.”

“But she did once,” said Hoyt. “Maybe it qualifies.”

“No,” said the Consul.

Martin Silenus had been writing notes on a pad but now
he stood and paced the length of the room. “Jesus Christ,
people. Look at us. We’re not six fucking pilgrims, we’re a
mob. Hoyt there with his cruciform carrying the ghost of Paul
Duré. Our ‘semisentient’ erg in the box there. Colonel Kassad
with his memory of Moneta. M. Brawne there, if we are to
believe her tale, carrying not only an unborn child but a
dead Romantic poet. Our scholar with the child his daughter
used to be. Me with my muse. The Consul with whatever
fucking baggage he’s brought to this insane trek. My God,
people, we should have received a fucking group rate for
this trip.”

“Sit down,” said Lamia in a dead even tone.

“No, he’s right,” said Hoyt. “Even the presence of Father
Duré in cruciform must affect the prime-number superstition
somehow. | say that we press on in the morning in the belief
that...”

“Look!” cried Brawne Lamia, pointing to the balcony
doorway where the fading twilight had been replaced with
pulses of strong light.

The group went out into the cool evening air, shielding
their eyes from the staggering display of silent explosions
which filled the sky: pure white fusion bursts expanding like
explosive ripples across a lapis pond; smaller, brighter
plasma implosions in blue and yellow and brightest red,
curling inward like flowers folding for the night: the
lightning dance of gigantic hellwhip displays, beams the
size of small worlds cutting their swath across light-hours
and being contorted by the _ riptides of defensive
singularities: the aurora shimmer of defense fields leaping
and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to be
reborn nanoseconds later. Amid it all, the blue-white fusion
tails of torchships and larger warships slicing perfectly true
lines across the sky like diamond scratches on blue glass.

“The Ousters,” breathed Brawne Lamia.

"m

“The war's begun,” said Kassad. There was no elation in
his voice, no emotion of any kind.

The Consul was shocked to discover that he was weeping
silently. He turned his face from the group.

“Are we in danger here?” asked Martin Silenus. He
sheltered under the stone archway of the door, squinting at
the brilliant display.

“Not at this distance,” said Kassad. He raised his combat
binoculars, made an adjustment, and consulted his tactical
comlog. “Most of the engagements are at least three AU
away. The Ousters are testing the FORCE:space defenses.”
He lowered the glasses. “It’s just begun.”

“Has the farcaster been activated yet?” asked Brawne
Lamia. “Are the people being evacuated from Keats and the
other cities?”

Kassad shook his head. “I don’t believe so. Not yet. The
fleet will be fighting a holding action until the cislunar
sphere is completed. Then the evacuation portals will be
opened to the Web while FORCE units come through by the
hundreds.” He raised the binoculars again. “It’ll be a hell of a
show.”

“Look!” It was Father Hoyt pointing this time, not at the
fireworks display in the sky but out across the low dunes of
the northern moors. Several kilometers toward the unseen
Tombs, a single figure was just visible as a speck of a form
throwing multiple shadows under the fractured sky.

Kassad trained his glasses on the figure.

“The Shrike?” asked Lamia.

“No, | don’t think so... | think it’s ... a Templar by the looks
of the robe.”

“Het Masteen!” cried Father Hoyt.

Kassad shrugged and handed the glasses around. The
Consul walked back to the group and leaned on the balcony.
There was no sound but the whisper of wind, but that made
the violence of explosions above them more ominous
somehow.

The Consul took his turn looking when the glasses came to
him. The figure was tall and robed, its back to the Keep, and
strode across the flashing vermilion sands with purposeful
intent.

“Is he headed toward us or the Tombs?” asked Lamia.

“The Tombs,” said the Consul.

Father Hoyt leaned elbows on the ledge and raised his
gaunt face to the exploding sky. “If it is Masteen, then we’re
back to seven, aren’t we?”

“He'll arrive hours before us,” said the Consul. “Half a day
if we sleep here tonight as we proposed.”

Hoyt shrugged. “That can’t matter too much. Seven set
out on the pilgrimage. Seven will arrive. The Shrike will be
satisfied.”

“If it is Masteen,” said Colonel Kassad, “why the charade
on the windwagon? And how did he get here before us?
There were no other tramcars running and he couldn't have
walked over the Bridle Range passes.”

“We'll ask him when we arrive at the Tombs tomorrow,”
Father Hoyt said tiredly.

Brawne Lamia had been trying to raise someone on her
comlog’s general comm frequencies. Nothing emerged but
the hiss of static and the occasional growl of distant EMPs.
She looked at Colonel Kassad. “When do they start
bombing?”

“| don’t know. It depends upon the strength of the FORCE,
fleet defenses.”

“The defenses weren’t very good the other day when the
Ouster scouts got through and destroyed the Yggdrasill,”
said Lamia.

Kassad nodded.

“Hey,” said Martin Silenus, “are we sitting on a fucking
target?”

“Of course,” said the Consul. “If the Ousters are attacking
Hyperion to prevent the opening of the Time Tombs, as M.

Lamia’s tale suggests, then the Tombs and this entire area
would be a primary target.”

“For nukes?” asked Silenus, his voice strained.

“Almost certainly,” answered Kassad.

“I thought something about the anti-entropic fields kept
ships away from here,” said Father Hoyt.

“Crewed ships,” said the Consul without looking back at
the others from where he leaned on the railing. “The anti-
entropic fields won’t bother guided missiles, smart bombs, or
hellwhip beams. It won’t bother mech infantry, for that
matter. The Ousters could land a few attack skimmers or
automated tanks and watch on remote while they destroy
the valley.”

“But they won’t,” said Brawne Lamia. “They want to
control Hyperion, not destroy it.”

“I wouldn’t wager my life on that supposition,” said
Kassad.

Lamia smiled at him. “But we are, aren’t we, Colonel?”

Above them, a single spark separated itself from the
continuous patchwork of explosions, grew into a bright
orange ember, and streaked across the sky. The group on the
terrace could see the flames, hear the tortured shriek of
atmospheric penetration. The fireball disappeared beyond
the mountains behind the Keep.

Almost a minute later, the Consul realized that he had
been holding his breath, his hands rigid on the stone railing.
He let out air in a gasp. The others seemed to be taking a
breath at the same moment. There had been no explosion,
no shock wave rumbling through the rock.

“A dud?” asked Father Hoyt.

“Probably an injured FORCE skirmisher trying to reach the
orbital perimeter or the spaceport at Keats,” said Colonel
Kassd.

“He didn’t mpke it, did he?” asked Lamia. Kassad did not
respond.

Martin Silenus lifted the field glasses and searched the
darkening moors for the Templar. “Out of sight,” said Silenus.
“The good Captain either rounded that hill just this side of
the Time Tombs valley or he pulled his disappearing act
again.”

“It’s a pity that well never hear his story,” said Father
Hoyt. He turned toward the Consul. “But we’ll hear yours,
won't we?”

The Consul rubbed his palms against his pant legs. His
heart was racing. “Yes,” he said, realizing even as he spoke
that he had finally made up his mind. “lII tell mine.”

The wind roared down the east slopes of the mountains
and whistled along the escarpment of Chronos Keep. The
explosions above them seemed to have diminished ever so
Slightly, but the coming of darkness made each one look
even more violent than the last.

“Let’s go inside,” said Lamia, her words almost lost in the
wind sound. “It’s getting cold.”

They had turned off the single lamp and the interior of the
room was lighted only by the heat-lightning pulses of color
from the sky outside. Shadows sprang into being, vanished,
and appeared again as the room was painted in many colors.
Sometimes the darkness would last several seconds before
the next barrage.

The Consul reached into his traveling bag and took out a
strange device, larger than a comlog, oddly ornamented,
and fronted with a liquid crystal diskey like something out of
a history holo.

“Secret fatline transmitter?” Brawne Lamia asked dryly.

The Consul’s smile showed no humor. “It’s an ancient
comlog. It came out during the Hegira.” He removed a
standard microdisk from a pouch on his belt and inserted it.
“Like Father Hoyt, | have someone else’s tale to tell before
you can understand my own.”

“Christ on a stick,” sneered Martin Silenus, “am | the only
one who can tell a straightforward story in this fucking herd?
How long do I have to...”

The Consul’s movement surprised even himself. He rose,
Spun, caught the smaller man by the cape and shirtfront,
slammed him against the wail, draped him over a packing
crate with a knee in Silenus’s belly and a forearm against his
throat, and hissed, “One more word from you, poet, and /’//
kill you.”

Silenus began to struggle but a tightening on his windpipe
and a glance at the Consul’s eyes made him cease. His face
was very white.

Colonel Kassad silently, almost gently, separated the two.
“There will be no more comments,” he said. He touched the
deathwanad in his belt.

Martin Silenus went to the far side of the circle, still
rubbing his throat, and slumped against a, crate without a
word. The Consul strode to the door, took several deep
breaths, and walked back to the group. He spoke to
everyone but the poet. “I’m sorry. It is just that ... | never
expected to share this.”

The light from outside surged red and then white, followed
by a blue glow which faded to near darkness.

“We know,” Brawne Lamia said softly. “We alt felt that
way.”

The Consul touched his lower lip, nodded, roughly cleared
his throat, and came to sit by the ancient comlog. “The
recording is not as old as the instrument,” he said. “It was
made about fifty standard years ago. l'Il have some more to
say when it’s over.” He paused as if there were more to be
said, shook his head, and thumbed the antique diskey.

There were no visuals. The voice was that of a young man.
In the background one could hear a breeze blowing through
grass or soft branches and, more distantly, the roll of surf.

Outside, the light pulsed madly as the tempo of the
distant space battle quickened. The Consul tensed as he

waited for the crash and concussion. There was none. He
closed his eyes and listened with the others.

THE CONSULS TALE:
REMEMBERING SIRI

pcm the steep hill to Siri’s tomb on the day the islands

return to the shallow seas of the Equatorial Archipelago.
The day is perfect and | hate it for being so. The sky is as
tranquil as tales of Old Earth’s seas, the shallows are
dappled with ultramarine tints, and a warm breeze blows in
from the sea to ripple the russet willowgrass on the hillside
near me.

Better low clouds and gray gloom on such a day. Better
mist or a shrouding fog which sets the masts in Firstsite
Harbor dripping and raises the lighthouse horn from its
slumbers. Better one of the great sea-simoons blowing up
out of the cold belly of the south, lashing before it the motile
isles and their dolphin herders until they seek refuge in the
lee of our atolls and stony peaks.

Anything would be better than this warm spring day when
the sun moves through a vault of sky so blue that it makes
me want to run, to jump in great loping arcs, and to roll in
the soft grass as Siri and | have done at just this spot.

Just this spot. | pause to look around. The willowgrass
bends and ripples like the fur of some great beast as the
Salt-tinged breeze gusts up out of the south. | shield my
eyes and search the horizon but nothing moves there. Out
beyond the lava reef, the sea begins to chop and lift itself in
nervous strokes.

“Siri,” | whisper. | say her name without meaning to do so.
A hundred meters down the slope, the crowd pauses to
watch me and to catch its collective breath. The procession
of mourners and celebrants stretches for more than a
kilometer to where the white buildings of the city begin. |
can make out the gray and balding head of my younger son
in the vanguard. He is wearing the blue and gold robes of
the Hegemony. | Know that | should wait for him, walk with
him, but he and the other aging Council members cannot
keep up with my young, ship-trained muscles and steady
stride. But decorum dictates that | should walk with him and
my granddaughter Lira and my nine-year-old grandson.

To hell with it. And to hell with them.

| turn and jog up the steep hillside. Sweat begins to soak
my loose cotton shirt before | reach the curving summit of
the ridge and catch sight of the tomb.

Siri’s tomb.

| stop. The wind chills me although the sunlight is warm
enough as it glints off the flawless white stone of the silent
mausoleum. The grass is high near the sealed entrance to
the crypt. Rows of faded festival pennants on ebony staffs
line the narrow gravel path.

Hesitating, | circle the tomb and approach the steep cliff
edge a few meters beyond. The willowgrass is bent and
trampled here where irreverent picnickers have laid their
blankets. There are several fire rings formed from the
perfectly round, perfectly white stones purloined from the
border of the gravel path.

| cannot stop a smile. | know the view from here: the great
curve of the outer harbor with its natural seawall, the low,
white buildings of Firstsite, and the colorful hulls and masts
of the catamarans bobbing at anchorage. Near the pebble
beach beyond Common Hall, a young woman in a white skirt
moves toward the water. For a second | think that it is Srri
and my heart pounds. | half prepare to throw up my arms in
response to her wave but she does not wave. | watch in

silence as the distant figure turns away and is lost in the
shadows of the old boat building.

Above me, far out from the cliff, a wide-winged Thomas
Hawk circles above the lagoon on rising thermals and scans
the shifting bluekelp beds with its infrared vision, seeking
out hajp seals or torpids. Nature is stupid, | think and sit in
the soft grass. Nature sets the stage all wrong for such a day
and then it is insensitive enough to throw in a bird searching
for prey which have long since fled the polluted waters near
the growing city.

| remember another Thomas Hawk on that first night when
Siri and | came to this hilltop. | remember the moonlight on
its wings and the strange, haunting cry which echoed off the
cliff and seemed to pierce the dark air above the gaslights of
the village below.

Siri was sixteen ... no, not quite sixteen ... and the
moonlight that touched the hawk’s wings above us also
painted her bare skin with milky light and cast shadows
beneath the soft circles of her breasts. We looked up guiltily
when the bird’s cry cut the night and Siri said, “ ‘It was the
nightingale and not the lark, That pierc’d the fearful hollow
of thine ear.’ ”

“Huh?” | said. Siri was almost sixteen. | was nineteen. But
Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of
theater under the stars. | knew only the stars.

“Relax, young Shipman,” she whispered and pulled me
down beside her then. “It’s only an old Tom’s Hawk hunting.
Stupid bird. Come back, Shipman. Come back, Merin.”

The Los Angeles had chosen that moment to rise above
the horizon and to float like a wind-borne ember west across
the strange constellations of Maui-Covenant, Siri’s world. |
lay next to her and described the workings of the great
Hawking-drive spinship which was catching the high
sunlight against the drop of night above us, and all the while
my hand was sliding lower along her smooth side, her skin
seemed all velvet and electricity, and her breath came more

quickly against my shoulder. | lowered my face to the hollow
of her neck, to the sweat and perfume essence of her
tousled hair.

“Siri,” | say and this time her name is not unbidden. Below
me, below the crest of the hill and the shadow of the white
tomb, the crowd stands and shuffles. They are impatient
with me. They want me to unseal the tomb, to enter, and to
have my private moment in the cool silent emptiness that
has replaced the warm presence that was Siri. They want me
to say my farewells so they can get on with their rites and
rituals, open the farcaster doors, and join the waiting
Worldweb of the Hegemony.

To hell with that. And to hell with them.

| pull up a tendril of the thickly woven willowgrass, chew
on the sweet stem, and watch the horizon for the first sign of
the migrating islands. The shadows are still long in the
morning light. The day is young. | will sit here for a while
and remember.

| will remember Siri.

Siri was a ... what? ... a bird, | think, the first time | saw
her. She was wearing some sort of mask with bright feathers.
When she removed it to join in the raceme quadrille, the
torchlight caught the deep auburn tints of her hair. She was
flushed, cheeks aflame, and even from across the crowded
common | could see the startling green of her eyes
contrasting with the summer heat of her face and hair. It was
Festival Night, of course. The torches danced and sparked to
the stiff breeze coming in off the harbor and the sound of
the flutists on the breakwall playing for the passing isles was
almost drowned out by surf sounds and the crack of
pennants snapping in the wind. Siri was almost sixteen and
her beauty burned more brightly than any of the torches set
round the throng-filled square. | pushed, through the
dancing crowd and went to her.

It was five years ago for me. It was more than sixty-five
years ago for us. It seems only yesterday.

This is not going well.

Where to start?

“What say we go find a little nooky, kid?” Mike Osho was
speaking. Short, squat, his pudgy face a clever caricature of
a Buddha, Mike was a god to me then. We were all gods;
long-lived if not immortal, well paid if not quite divine. The
Hegemony had chosen us to help crew one of its precious
quantum-leap spinships, so how could we be less than gods?
It was just that Mike, brilliant, mercurial, irreverent Mike, was
a little older and a little higher in the Shipboard pantheon
than young Merin Aspic.

“Hah. Zero probability of that,” | said. We were scrubbing
up after a twelve-hour shift with the farcaster construction
crew. Shuttling the workers around their chosen singularity
point some one hundred and sixty-three thousand
kilometers out from Maui-Coverrant was a lot less glamorous
for us than the four-month leap from Hegemony-space,
During the C-plus portion of the trip we had been master
specialists; forty-nine starship experts shepherding some
two hundred nervous passengers. Now the passengers had
their hardsuits on and we Shipmen had been reduced to
serving as glorified truck drivers as the construction crew
wrestled the bulky singularity containment sphere into
place.

“Zero probability,” | repeated. “Unless the groundlings
have added a whorehouse to that quarantine island they
leased us.”

“Nope. They haven’t,” grinned Mike. He and | had our
three days of planetary R and R coming up but we knew
from Shipmaster Singh’s briefings and the moans of our
Shipmates that the only ground time we had to look forward
to would be spent on a seven-by-4-kilometer island

administered by the Hegemony. It wasn’t even one of the
motile isles we had heard about, just another volcanic peak
near the equator. Once there, we could count on real gravity
underfoot, unfiltered air to breathe, and the chance to taste
unsynthesized food. But we could also count on the fact that
the only intercourse we would have with the Maui-Covenant
colonists would be through buying local artifacts at the duty
free store. Even those were sold by Hegemony trade
specialists. Many of our Shipmates had chosen to spend
their R and R on the Los Angeles.

“So how do we find a little nooky, Mike? The colonies are
off limits until the farcaster’s working. That’s about sixty
years away, local time. Or are you talking about Meg in
spincomp?”

“Stick with me, kid,” said Mike. “Where there’s a will,
there’s a way.”

| stuck with Mike. There were only five of us in the
dropship. It was always a thrill to me to fall out of high orbit
into the atmosphere of a real world. Especially a world that
looked as much tike Old Earth as Maui-Covenant did. | stared
at the blue and white limb of the planet until the seas were
down and we were in atmosphere, approaching the twilight
terminator in a gentle glide at three times the speed of our
own sound.

We were gods then. But even gods must descend from
their high thrones upon occasion.

° e ka

Siri's body never ceased to amaze me. That time on the
Archipelago. Three weeks in that huge, swaying treehouse
under the billowing treesails with the dolphin herders
keeping pace like outriders, tropical sunsets filling the
evening with wonder, the canopy of stars at night, and our
own wake marked by a thousand phosphorescent swirls that
mirrored the constellations above. And still it is Siri’s body |
remember. For some _ reason—shyness, the years of

separation—she wore two strips of swimsuit for the first few
days of our Archipelago stay and the soft white of her
breasts and lower belly had not darkened to match the rest
of her tan before | had to leave again.

| remember her that first time. Triangles in the moonlight
as we lay in the soft grass above Firstsite Harbor. Her silk
pants catching on a weave of willowgrass. There was a
child’s modesty then; the slight hesitation of something
given prematurely. But also pride. The same pride that later
allowed her to face down the angry mob of Separatists on
the steps of the Hegemony consulate in South Tern and send
them to their homes in shame.

| remember my fifth planetfali, our Fourth Reunion. It was
one of the few times | ever saw her cry. She was almost regal
in her fame and wisdom by then. She had been elected four
times to the All Thing and the Hegemony Council turned to
her for advice and guidance. She wore her independence
like a royal cloak and her fierce pride had never burned
more brightly. But when we were alone in the stone villa
south of Fevarone, it was she who turned away. | was
nervous, frightened by this powerful stranger, but it was Siri
—Siri of the straight back and proud eyes, who turned her
face to the wall and said through tears, “Go away. Go away,
Merin. | don’t want you to see me. I’m a crone, all slack and
Sagging. Go away.”

| confess that | was rough with her then. | pinned her prists
with my left hand—using a strength which surprised even
me—and tore her silken robe down the front in one move. |
kissed her shoulders, her neck, the faded ihadows of stretch
marks on her taut belly, and the scar on her upper leg from
the skimmer crash some forty of her years earlier. | kissed
her graying hair and the lines etched in the once smooth
cheeks. | kissed her tears.

“Jesus, Mike, this can’t be legal,” I’d said when my friend
unrolled the hawking mat from his backpack. We were on
island 241, as the Hegemony traders had so romantically
named the desolate volcanic blemish which they had chosen
for our R and R site. Island 241 was less than fifty kilometers
from the oldest of the colonial settlements but it might as
well have been fifty light-years away. No native ships were to
put in at the island while Los Angeles crewmen or farcaster
workmen were present. The Maui-Covenant colonists had a
few ancient skimmers still in working order, but by mutual
agreement there would be no overflights. Except for the
dormitories, swimming beach, and the duty free store, there
was little on the island to interest us Shipmen. Someday,
when the last components had been brought in-system by
the Los Angeles and the farcaster finished, Hegemony
officials would make island 241 into a center for trade and
tourism. Until then it was a primitive place with a dropship
grid, newly finished buildings of the local white stone, and a
few bored maintenance people. Mike checked the two of us
out for three days of backpacking on the steepest and most
inaccessible end of the little island.

“| don’t want to go backpacking, for Chrissake,” I’d said.
“I'd rather stay on the L.A. and plug into a stimsim.”

“Shut up and follow me,” said Mike and, like a lesser
member of the pantheon following an older and wiser deity,
| had shut up and followed. Two hours of heavy tramping up
the slopes through sharp-branched scrubtrees brought us to
a lip of lava several hundred meters above the crashing surf.
We were near the equator on a mostly tropical world but on
this exposed ledge the wind was howling and my teeth were
chattering. The sunset was a red smear between dark
Cumulus to the west and | had no wish to be out in the open
when full night descended.

“Come on,” | said. “Let’s get out of the wind and build a
fire. | don’t know how the hell we’re going to set up a tent on

all of this rock.”

Mike sat down and lit a cannabis stick. “Take a look in your
pack, kid.”

| hesitated. His voice had been neutral but it was the flat
neutrality of the practical joker’s voice just before the
bucket of water descends. | crouched down and began
pawing through the nylon sack. The pack was empty except
for old flowfoam packing cubes to fill it out. Those and a
Harlequin’s costume complete with mask and bells on the
toes.

“Are you... is this ... are you goddamn crazy?” | spluttered.
It was getting dark quickly now. The storm might or might
not pass to the south of us. The surf was rasping below like a
hungry beast. If | had known how to find my own way back
to the trade compound in the dark, | might have considered
leaving Mike Osho’s remains to feed the fishes far below.

“Now look at what’s in my pack,” he said. Mike dumped
out some flowfoam cubes and then removed some jewelry of
the type I’d seen handcrafted on Renaissance Vector, an
inertial compass, a laser pen which might or might not be
labeled a concealed weapon by ShipSecurity, another
Harlequin costume—this one tailored to his more rotund
form—and a hawking mat.

“Jesus, Mike,” | said while running my hand over the
exquisite design of the old carpet, “this can’t be legal.”

“| didn’t notice any customs agents back there,” grinned
Mike. “And | seriously doubt that the locals have any traffic
control ordnances.”

“Yes, but...” | trailed off and unrolled the rest of the mat It
was a little more than a meter wide and about two meters
long. The rich fabric had faded with age but the flight
threads were still as bright as new copper. “Where did you
get it?” | asked. “Does it still work?”

“On Garden,” said Mike and stuffed my costume and his
other gear into his backpack. “Yes, it does.”

It had been more than a century since old Vladimir
Sholokov, Old Earth emigrant, master lepidopterist, and EM
systems engineer, had handcrafted the firsf hawking mat for
his beautiful young niece on New Earth. Legend had it that
the niece had scorned the gift but over the decades the toys
had become almost absurdly popular—more with rich adults
than with children—until they were outlawed on most
Hegemony worlds. Dangerous to handle, a waste of shielded
monofilaments, almost impossible to deal with in controlled
airspace, hawking mats had become curiosities reserved for
bedtime stories, museums, and a few colony worlds.

“It must have cost you a fortune,” | said.

“Thirty marks,” said Mike and settled himself on the center
of the carpet. “The old dealer in Carvnel Marketplace
thought it was worthless. It was ... for him. | brought it back
to the ship, charged it up, reprogrammed the inertia chips,
and voila!" Mike palmed the intricate design and the mat
stiffened and rose fifteen centimeters above the rock ledge.

| stared doubtfully. “All right,” | said, “but what if it ...”

“It won't,” said Mike and impatiently patted the carpet
behind him. “It’s fully charged. | know how to handle it.
Come on, climb on or stand back. | want to get going before
that storm gets any closer.”

“But | don’t think ...”

“Come on, Merin. Make up your mind. I’m in a hurry.”

| hesitated for another second or two. If we were caught
leaving the island, we would both be kicked off the ship.
Shipwork was my life now. | had made that decision when |
accepted the eight-mission Maui-Covenant contract. More
than that, | was two hundred light-years and five and a half
leap years from civilization. Even if they brought us back to
Hegemony-space, the round trip would have cost us eleven
years’ worth of friends and family. The time-debt was
irrevocable.

| crawled on the hovering hawking mat behind Mike. He
stuffed the backpack between us, told me to hang on, and

tapped at the flight designs. The mat rose five meters above
the ledge, banked quickly to the left, and shot out over the
alien ocean. Three hundred meters below us, the surf
crashed whitely in the deepening gloom. We rose higher
above the rough water and headed north into the night.

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

° e ka

| remember talking to Siri during our Second Reunion,
Shortly after we first visited the villa along the coast near
Fevarone. We were walking along the beach. Alon had been
allowed to stay in the city under Magritte’s supervision. It
was just as well. | was not truly comfortable with the boy.
Only the undeniable green solemnity of his eyes and the
disturbing mirror-familiarity of his short, dark curls and snub
of a nose served to tie him to me ... to us ... in my mind.
That and the quick, almost sardonic smile | would catch him
hiding from Siri when she reprimanded him. It was a smile
too cynically amused and self-observant to be so practiced
in a ten-year-old. | knew it well. | would have thought such
things were learned, not inherited.

“You know very little,” Siri said to me. She was wading,
shoeless, in a shallow tidepool. From time to time she would
lift the delicate shell of a frenchhorn conch, inspect it for
flaws, and drop it back into the silty water.

“I’ve been well trained,” | replied.

“Yes, I'm sure you've been well trained,” agreed Siri. “l
know you are quite skillful, Merin. But you know very little.”

Irritated, unsure of how to respond, | walked along with my
head lowered. | dug a white lavastone out of the sand and
tossed it far out into the bay. Rain clouds were piling along
the eastern horizon. | found myself wishing that | was back
aboard the ship. | had been reluctant to return this time and
now | knew that it had been a mistake. It was my third visit
to Maui-Covenant, our Second Reunion as the poets and her
people were calling it. | was five months away from being

twenty-one standard years old. Siri had just celebrated her
thirty-seventh birthday three week earlier.

“I’ve been to a lot of places you’ve never seen,” | said at
last. It sounded petulant and childish even to me.

“Oh, yes,” said Siri and clapped her hands together. For a
second, in her enthusiasm, | glimpsed my other Siri—the
young girl | had dreamed about during the long nine months
of turnaround. Then the image slid back to harsh reality and
| was all too aware of her short hair, the loosening neck
muscles, and the cords appearing on the backs of those
once beloved hands. “You’ve been to places l'Il never see,”
Said Siri in a rush. Her voice was the same. Almost the same.
“Merin, my love, you’ve already seen things | cannot even
imagine. You probably know more facts about the universe
than | would guess exist. But you know very little, my
darling.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Siri?” | sat down ona
half-submerged log near the strip of wet sand and drew my
knees up like a fence between us.

Siri strode out of the tidepool and came to kneel in front of
me. She took my hands in hers and, although mine were
bigger, heavier, blunter of finger and bone, | could feel the
strength in hers. | imagined it as the strength of years | had
not shared. “You have to live to really know things, my love.
Having Alon has helped me to understand that. There is
something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s
sense of what is real.”

“How do you mean?”

Siri squinted away from me for a few seconds and absently
brushed back a strand of hair. Her left hand stayed firmly
around both of mine. “I’m not sure,” she said softly. “I think
one begins to feel when things aren’t important. I'm not sure
how to put it. When you've spent thirty years entering rooms
filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've
had only half that number of years of experience. You know
what the room and the people in it probably hold for you

and you go looking for it. If it’s not there, you sense it earlier
and leave to go about your business. You just know more
about what is, what isn’t, and how little time there is to learn
the difference. Do you understand, Merin? Do you follow me
even a little bit?”

“No,” | said.

Siri nodded and bit her lower lip. But she did not speak
again for a while. Instead, she leaned over and kissed me.
Her lips were dry and a little questioning. | held back for a
second, seeing the sky beyond her, wanting time to think.
But then | felt the warm intrusion of her tongue and ctystid
my eyes. The tide was coming in behind us. | felt a
sympathetic warmth and rising as Siri unbuttoned my shirt
and ran sharp fingernails across my chest. There was a
second of emptiness between us and | opened my eyes in
time to see her unfastening the last buttons on the front of
her white dress. Her breasts were larger than | remembered,
heavier, the nipples broader and darker. The chill air nipped
at both of us until | pulled the fabric down her shoulders and
brought our upper bodies together. We slid down along the
log to the warm sand. | pressed her closer, all the while
wondering how | possibly could have thought her the
stronger one. Her skin tasted of salt.

Siri's hands helped me. Her short hair pressed back
against bleached wood, white cotton, and sand. My pulse
outraced the surf.

“Do you understand, Merin?” she whispered to me seconds
later as her warmth connected us.

“Yes,” | whispered back. But I did not.

Mike brought the hawking mat in from the east toward
Firstsite. The flight had taken over an hour in the dark and |
had spent most of the time huddling from the wind and
waiting for the carpet to fold up and tumble us both into the
sea. We were still half an hour out when we saw the first of

the motile isles. Racing before the storm, treesails billowing,
the islands sailed up from their southern feeding grounds in
seemingly endless procession. Many were lit brilliantly,
festooned with colored lanterns and shifting veils of
gossamer light.

“You sure this is the way?” | shouted.

“Yes,” shouted Mike. He did not turn his head. The wind
whipped his long black hair back against my face. From time
to time he would check his compass and make small
corrections to our course. It might have been easier to follow
the isles. We passed one—a large one almost half a
kilometer in length—and | strained to make out details but
the isle was dark except for the glow of its phosphorescent
wake. Dark shapes cut through the milky waves. | tapped
Mike on the shoulder and pointed.

“Dolphins!” he shouted. “That’s what this colony was all
about, remember? A bunch of decoders during the Hegira
wanted to save all the mammals in Old Earth’s oceans.
Didn’t succeed.”

| would have shouted another question but at that
moment the headland and Firstsite Harbor came into view.

| had thought the stars were bright above Maui-Covenant.
| had thought the migrating islands were memorable in their
colorful display. But the city of Firstsite, wrapped about with
harbor and hills, was a blazing beacon in the night. Its
brilliance reminded me of a torchship | once had watched
while it created its own plasma nova against the dark limb of
a sullen gas giant. The city was a five-tiered honeycomb of
white buildings, all illuminated by warmly glowing lanterns
from within and by countless torches from without. The
white lavastone of the volcanic island itself seemed to glow
from the city light. Beyond the town were tents, pavilions,
campfires, cooking fires, and great flaming pyres, too large
for function, too large for anything except to serve as a
welcome to the returning isles.

The harbor was filled with boats: bobbing catamarans with
cowbells clanking from their masts, large-hulled, flat-
bottomed houseboats built for creeping from port to port in
the calm equatorial shallows but proudly ablaze with strings
of lights this night, and then the occasional oceangoing
yacht, sleek and functional as a shark. A lighthouse set out
on the pincer’s end of the harbor reef threw its beam far out
to sea, illuminated wave and isle alike, and then swept its
light back in to catch the colorful bobbing of ships and men.

Even from two kilometers out we could hear the noise.
Sounds of celebration were clearly audible. Above the
shouts and constant susurration of the surf rose the
unmistakable notes of a Bach flute sonata. | learned later
that this welcoming chorus was transmitted through
hydrophones to the Passage Channels where dolphins
leaped and cavorted to the music.

“My God, Mike, how did you know all of this was going
on?”

“I asked the main ship computer,” said Mike. The hawking
mat banked right to keep us far out from the ships and
lighthouse beam. Then we curved back in north of Firstsite
toward a dark spit of land. | could hear the soft booming of
waves on the shallows ahead. “They have this festival every
year,” Mike went on, “but this is their sesquicentennial. The
party’s been going on for three weeks now and is scheduled
to continue another two. There are only about a hundred
thousand colonists on this whole world, Merin, and | bet half
of them are here partying.”

We slowed, came in carefully, and touched down on a
rocky outcropping not far from the beach. The storm had
missed us to the south but intermittent flashes of lightning
and the distant tights of advancing isles stillf marked the
horizon. Overhead, the stars were not dimmed by the glow
from Firstsite just over the rise from us. The air was warmer
here and | caught the scent of orchards on the breeze. We
folded up the hawking mat and hurried to get into our

Harlequin costumes. Mike slipped his laser pen and jewelry
into loose pockets.

“What are those for?” | asked as we secured the backpack
and hawking mat under a large boulder.

“These?” asked Mike as he dangled a Renaissance
necklace from his fingers. “These are currency in case we
have to negotiate for favors.”

“Favors?”

“Favors,” repeated Mike. “A lady’s largesse. Comfort to a
weary spacefarer. Nooky to you, kid.”

“Oh,” | said and adjusted my mask and fool’s cap. The
bells made a soft sound in the dark.

“Come on,” said Mike. “We'll miss the party.” | nodded and
followed him, bells jangling, as we picked our way over
stone and scrub toward the waiting light.

| sit here in the sunlight and wait, | am not totally certain
what | am waiting for, | can feel a growing warmth on my
back as the morning sunlight is reflected from the white
stone of Siri’s tomb.

Siri’s tomb?

There are no clouds in the sky. | raise my head and squint
Skyward as if | might be able to see the L. A. and the newly
finished farcaster array through the glare of atmosphere. |
cannot. Part of me knows that they have not risen yet. Part
of me knows to the second the time remaining before ship
and farcaster complete their transit to the zenith. Part of me
does not want to think about it.

Siri, am | doing the right thing?

There is the sudden sound of pennants stirring on their
staffs as the wind comes up. | sense rather than see the
restlessness of the waiting crowd. For the first time since my
planetfall for this, our Sixth Reunion, | am filled with sorrow.
No, not sorrow, not yet, but a sharp-toothed sadness which
soon will open into grief. For years | have carried on silent

conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for
future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with
cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An
emptiness begins to grow inside me.

Should | let it happen, Siri?

There is no response except for the growing murmurs of
the crowd. In a few minutes they will send Donel, my
younger and surviving son, or his daughter Lira and her
brother up the hill to urge me on. | toss away the sprig of
willowgrass I’ve been chewing on. There is a hint of shadow
on the horizon. It could be a cloud. Or it could be the first of
the isles, driven by instinct and the spring northerlies to
migrate back to the great band of the equatorial shallows
from whence they came. It does not matter.

Siri, am | doing the right thing?

There is no answer and the time grows shorter.

Sometimes Siri seemed so ignorant it made me sick.

She knew nothing of my life away from her. She would ask
questions but | sometimes wondered if she was interested in
the answers. | spent many hours explaining the beautiful
physics behind our spinships but she never did seem to
understand. Once, after | had taken great care to detail the
differences between their ancient seedship and the Los
Angeles, Siri astounded me by asking, “But why did it take
my ancestors eighty years of shiptime to reach Maui-
Covenant when you can make the trip in a hundred and
thirty days?” She had understood nothing.

Siri’s sense of history was, at best, pitiful. She viewed the
Hegemony and the Worldweb the way a child would view
the fantasy world of a pleasant but rather silly myth; there
was an indifference there that almost drove me mad at
times.

Siri knew all about the early days of the Hegira—at least
insofar as they pertained to the Maui-Covenant and the

colonists—and she occasionally would come tip with
delightful bits of archaic trivia or phraseology, but she knew
nothing of post-Hegira realities. Names like Garden and the
Ousters, Renaissance and Lusus meant little to her. | could
mention Salmud Brevy or General Horace Glennon-Height
and she would have no associations or reactions at all. None.

The last time | saw Siri she was seventy standard years
old. She was seventy years old and still she had never—
traveled offworld, used a fatline, tasted any alcoholic drink
except wine, interfaced with an empathy surgeon, stepped
through a farcaster door, smoked a cannabis stick, received
gene tailoring, plugged into a stimsim, received any formal
schooling, taken any RNA medication, heard of Zen Gnostics
or the Shrike Church, or flown any vehicle except an ancient
Vikken skimmer belonging to her family.

Siri had never made love to anyone except me. Or so she
said. And so | believed.

It was during our First Reunion, that time on the
Archipelago, when Siri took me to talk with the dolphins.

We had risen to watch the dawn. The highest levels of the
tree-house were a perfect place from which ta watch the
eastern sky pale and fade to morning. Ripples of high cirrus
turned to rose and then the sea itself grew molten as the sun
floated above the flat horizon.

“Lets go swimming,” said Siri. The rich, horizontal light
bathed her skin and threw her shadow four meters across
the boards of the platform.

“I’m too tired,” | said. “Later.” We had lain awake most of
the night talking, making love, talking, and making love
again. In the glare of morning | felt empty and vaguely
nauseated. | sensed the slight movement of the isle under
me as a tinge of vertigo, a drunkard’s disconnection from
gravity.

“No. Let’s go now,” said Siri and grasped my hand to pull
me along. | was irritated but did not argue. Siri was twenty-
six, seven years older than | during that First Reunion, but
her impulsive behavior often reminded me of the teen-aged
Siri | had carried away from the Festival only ten of my
months earlier. Her deep, unself-conscious laugh was the
same. Her green eyes cut as sharply when she was
impatient. The long mane of auburn hair had not changed.
But her body had ripened, filled out with a promise which
had been only hinted at before. Her breasts were still high
and full, almost girlish, bordered above by freckles that gave
way to a whiteness so translucent that a gentle blue tracery
of veins could be seen. But they were different somehow.
She was different.

“Are you going to join me or just sit there staring?” asked
Siri. She had slipped off her caftan as we came out onto the
lowest deck. Our small ship was still tied to the dock. Above
us, the island’s treesails were beginning to open to the
morning breeze. For the past several days Siri had insisted
on wearing swimstrips when we went into the water. She
wore none now. Her nipples rose in the cool air.

“Won't we be left behind?” | asked, squinting up at the
flapping treesails. On previous days we had waited for the
doldrums in the middle of the day when the isle was still in
the water, the sea a glazed mirror. Now the jibvines were
beginning to pull taut as the thick leaves filled with wind.

“Don't be silly,” said Siri. “We could always catch a
keelroot and follow it back. That or a feeding tendril. Come
on.” She tossed an osmosis mask at me and donned her
own. The transparent film made her face look slick with oil.
From the pocket of her caftan she lifted a thick medallion
and set it in place around her neck. The metal looked dark
and ominous against her skin.

“What’s that?” | asked.

Siri did not lift the osmosis mask to answer. She set the
comthreads in place against her neck and handed me the

hearplugs. Her voice was tinny. “Translation disk,” she said.
“Thought you knew all about gadgets, Merin. Last one in’s a
seaslug.” She held the disk in place between her breasts
with one hand and stepped off the isle. | could see the pale
globes of her buttocks as she pirouetted and kicked for
depth. In seconds she was only a white blur deep in the
water. | slipped my own mask on, pressed the comthreads
tight, and stepped into the sea.

The bottom of the isle was a dark stain on a ceiling of
crystalline light. | was wary of the thick feeding tendrils
even though Siri had amply demonstrated that they were
interested in devouring nothing larger than the tiny
zooplankton that even now caught the sunlight like dust in
an abandoned ballroom. Keelroots descended like gnarled
stalactites for hundreds of meters into the purple depths.

The isle was moving. | could see the faint fibrillation of the
tendrils as they trailed along. A wake caught the light ten
meters above me. For a second | was choking, the gel of the
mask smothering me as surely as the surrounding water
would, and then | relaxed and the air flowed freely into my
lungs.

“Deeper, Merin,” came Siri’s voice. | blinked—a_ slow-
motion blink as the mask readjusted itself over my eyes—
and caught sight of Siri twenty meters lower, grasping a
keelroot and trailing effortlessly above the colder, deeper
currents where the light did hot reach. | thought of the
thousands of meters of water under me, of the things which
might lurk there, unknown, unsought out by the human
colonists. | thought of the dark and the depths and my
scrotum tightened involuntarily.

“Come on down.” Siri’s voice was an insect buzz in my
ears. | rotated and kicked. The buoyancy here was not so
great as in Old Earth’s seas, but it still took energy to dive so
deep. The mask compensated for depth and nitrogen but |
could feel the pressure against my skin and ears. Finally |

quit kicking, grabbed a keelroot, and roughly hauled myself
down to Siri’s level.

We floated side by side in the dim light. Siri was a spectral
figure here, her long hair swirling in a wine-dark nimbus, the
pale strips of her body glowing in the blue-green light. The
surface seemed impossibly distant. The widening V of the
wake and the drift of the scores of tendrils showed that the
isle was moving more quickly now, moving mindlessly to
other feeding grounds, distant waters.

“Where are the ...” | began to subvocalize.

“Shhh,” said Siri. She fiddled with the medallion. | could
hear them then: the shrieks and trills and whistles and cat
purrs and echoing cries. The depths were suddenly filled
with strange music.

“Jesus,” | said and because Siri had tuned our comthreads
to the translator, the word was broadcast as a senseless
whistle and toot.

“Hello!” she called and, the translated greeting echoed
from the transmitter; a high-speed bird’s call sliding into the
ultrasonic. “Hello!” she called again.

Minutes passed before the dolphins came to investigate.
They rolled past us, surprisingly large, alarmingly large, their
skin looking slick and muscled in the uncertain light. A large
one swam within a meter of us, turning at the last moment
so that the white of his belly curved past us like a wall. |
could see the dark eye rotate to follow me as he passed. One
stroke of his wide fluke kicked up a turbulence strong
enough to convince me of the animal’s power.

“Hello,” called Siri but the swift form faded into distant
haze and there was a sudden silence. Siri clicked off the
translator. “Do you want to talk to them?” she asked.

“Sure.” | was dubious. More than three centuries of effort
had not raised much of a dialogue between man and sea
mammal. Mike had once told me that the thought structures
of Old Earth’s two groups of orphans were too different, the
referents too few. One pre-Hegira expert had written that

speaking to a dolphin or porpoise was about as rewarding as
speaking to a one-year-old human infant. Both sides usually
enjoyed the exchange and there was a simulacrum of
conversation, but neither party would come away the more
knowledgeable. Siri switched the translator disk back on.
“Hello,” | said.

There was a final minute of silence and then our
earphones were buzzing while the sea echoed shrill
ululations.

distance/no-fluke/hello-tone?/current pulse/circle
me/funny?

“What the hell?” | asked Siri and the translator trilled out
my question. Siri was grinning under her osmosis mask.

| tried again. “Hello! Greetings from ... uh ... the surface.
How are you?”

The large male ... | assumed it to be a male ... curved in
toward us like a torpedo. He arch-kicked his way through the
water ten times faster than | could have swum even if | had
remembered to don flippers that morning. For a second |
thought he was going to ram us and | raised my knees and
clung tightly to the keelroot. Then he was past us, climbing
for air, while Siri and | reeled from his turbulent wake and
the high tones of his shout.

no-fluke/no-feed/no-swim/no-play/no-fun.

Siri switched off the translator and floated closer. She
lightly grasped my shoulders while | held on to the keelroot
with my right hand. Our legs touched as we drifted through
the warm water. A school of tiny crimson warriorfish flickered
above us while the dark shapes of the dolphins circled
farther out.

“Had enough?” she asked. Her hand was flat on my chest.

“One more try,” | said. Siri nodded and twisted the disk to
life. The current pushed us together again. She slid her arm
around me.

“Why do you herd the islands?” | asked the bottle-nosed
Shapes circling in the dappled light. “How does it benefit

you to stay with the isles?”

sounding now/old songs/deep water/no-Great Voices/no-
Shark/old songs/new songs.

Siri's body lay along the length of me now. Her left arm
tightened around me. “Great Voices were the whales,” she
whispered. Her hair fanned out in streamers. Her right hand
moved down and seemed surprised at what it found.

“Do you miss the Great Voices?” | asked the shadows.
There was no response. Siri slid her legs around my hips. The
surface was a churning bowl of light forty meters above us.

“What do you miss most of Old Earth’s oceans?” | asked.
With my left arm | pulled Siri closer, slid my hand down
along the curve of her back to where her buttocks rose to
meet my palm, held her tight. To the circling dolphins we
must have appeared a single creature. Siri lifted herself
against me and we became a single creature.

The translator disk had twisted around so it trailed over
Siri's shoulder. | reached to shut it off but paused as the
answer to my question buzzed urgently in our ears.

miss Shark/miss Shark/miss Shark/miss
Shark/Shark/Shark/Shark.

| turned off the disk and shook my head. | did not
understand. There was so much | did not understand. |
closed my eyes as Siri and | moved gently to the rhythms of
the current and ourselves while the dolphins swam nearby
and the cadence of their calls took on the sad, slow trilling of
an old lament.

Siri and | came down out of the hills and returned to the
Festival just before sunrise of the second day. For a night
and a day we had roamed the hills, eaten with strangers in
pavilions of orange silk, bathed together in the icy waters of
the Shree, and danced to the music which never ceased
going out to the endless file of passing isles. We were
hungry. | had awakened at sunset to find Siri gone. She

returned before the moon of Maui-Covenant rose. She told
me that her parents had gone off with friends for several
days on a slow-moving houseboat. They had left the family
Skimmer in Firstsite. Now we worked our way from dance to
dance, bonfire to bonfire, back to the center of the city. We
planned to fly west to her family estate near Fevarone.

It was very late but Firstsite Common still had its share of
revelers. | was very happy. | was nineteen and | was in love
and the .93 gravity of Maui-Covenant seemed much less to
me. | could have flown had | wished. | could have done
anything.

We had stopped at a booth and bought fried dough and
mugs of black coffee. Suddenly a thought struck me. |
asked, “How did you know | was a Shipman?”

“Hush, friend Merin. Eat your poor breakfast. When we get
to the villa, | will fix a true meal to break our fast.”

“No, I’m serious,” | said and wiped grease off my chin with
the sleeve of my less than clean Harlequin’s costume. “This
morning you said that you knew right away last night that |
was from the ship. Why was that? Was it my accent? My
costume? Mike and | saw other fellows dressed like this.”

Siri laughed and brushed back her hair. “Just be glad it
was | who spied you out, Merin, my love. Had it been my
Uncle Gresham or his friends it would have meant trouble.”

“Oh? Why is that?” | picked up one more fried ring and Siri
paid for it. | followed her through the thinning crowd.
Despite the motion and the music all about, | felt weariness
beginning to work on me.

“They are Separatists,” said Siri. “Uncle Gresham recently
gave a speech before the Council urging that we fight rather
than agree to be swallowed into your Hegemony. He said
that we should destroy your farcaster device before it
destroys us.”

“Oh?” | said. “Did he say how he was going to do that? The
last | heard, you folks had no craft to get off world in.”

“Nay, nor for the past fifty years have we,” said Siri. “But it
shows how irrational the Separatists can be.”

| nodded. Shipmaster Singh and Councilor Halmyn had
briefed us on the so-called Separatists of Maui-Covenant.
“The usual coalition of colonial jingoists and throwbacks,”
Singh had said. “Another reason we go slow and develop the
world’s trade potential before finishing the farcaster. The
Worldweb doesn’t need these yahoos coming in prematurely.
And groups like the Separatists are another reason to keep
you crew and construction workers the hell away from the
groundlings.”

“Where is your skimmer?” | asked. The Common was
emptying quickly. Most of the bands had packed up their
instruments for the night. Gaily costumed heaps lay snoring
on the grass or cobblestones amid the litter and unlit
lanterns. Only a few enclaves of merriment remained, groups
dancing slowly to a lone guitar or singing drunkenly to
themselves. | saw Mike Osho at once, a patchworked fool, his
mask long gone, a girl on either arm. He was trying to teach
the “Hava Nagilla” to a rapt but inept circle of admirers. One
of the troupe would stumble and they would all fall down.
Mike would flog them to their feet among general laughter
and they would start again, hopping clumsily to his basso
profundo chant.

“There it is,” said Siri and pointed to a short line of
Skimmers parked behind the Common Hall. | nodded and
waved to Mike but he was too busy hanging on to his two
ladies to notice me. Siri and | had crossed the square and
were in the shadows of the old building when the shout went
up.

“Shipman! Turn around, you Hegemony son of a bitch.”

| froze and then wheeled around with fists clenched but no
one was near me. Six young men had descended the steps
from the grandstand and were standing in a semicircle
behind Mike. The man in front was tall, slim, and strikingly
handsome. He was twenty-five or twenty-six years old and

his long blond curls spilled down on a crimson silk suit that
emphasized his physique, In his right hand he carried a
meter-long sword that looked to be of tempered steel.

Mike turned slowly. Even from a distance | could see his
eyes sobering as he surveyed the situation. The women at
his side and a couple of the young men in his group tittered
as if something humorous had been said. Mike allowed the
inebriated grin to stay on his face. “You address me, sir?” he
asked.

“| address you, you Hegemony whore’s son,” hissed the
leader of the group. His handsome face was twisted into a
sneer.

“Bertol,” whispered Siri. “My cousin. Gresham’s younger
son.” | nodded and stepped out of the shadows. Siri caught
my arm.

“That is twice you have referred unkindly to my mother,
sir,” slurred Mike. “Have she or | offended you in some way?
If so, a thousand pardons.” Mike bowed so deeply that the
bells on his cap almost brushed the ground. Members of his
group applauded.

“Your presence offends me, you Hegemony bastard. You
stink up our air with your fat carcass.”

Mike’s eyebrows rose comically. A young man near him in
a fish costume waved his hand. “Oh, come on, Bertol. He’s
just...”

“Shut up, Ferick. It is this fat shithead | am speaking to.”

“Shithead?” repeated Mike, eyebrows still raised. “lve
traveled two hundred light-years to be called a fat shithead?
It hardly seems worth it.” He pivoted gracefully, untangling
himself from the women as he did so. | would have joined
Mike then but Siri clung tightly to my arm, whispering
unheard entreaties. When | was free | saw that Mike was still
smiling, still playing the fool. But his left hand was in his
baggy shirt pocket.

“Give him your blade, Creg,” snapped Bertol. One of the
younger men tossed a sword hilt-first to Mike. Mike watched

it arc by and clang loudly on the cobblestones.

“You can’t be serious,” said Mike in a soft voice that was
suddenly quite sober. “You cretinous cow turd. Do you really
think I’m going to play duel with you just because you get a
hard-on acting the hero for these yokels?”

“Pick up the sword,” screamed Bertol, “or, by God, I'll
carve you where you stand.” He took a quick step forward.
The youth’s face contorted with fury as he advanced.

“Fuck off” said Mike. In his left hand was the laser pen.

“No!” | yelled and ran into the light. That pen was used by
construction workers to scrawl marks on girders of whiskered
alloy.

Things happened very quickly then. Bertol took another
step and Mike flicked the green beam across him almost
casually. The colonist let out a cry and leaped back; a
smoking line of black was slashed diagonally across his silk
Shirtfront. | hesitated. Mike had the setting as low as it could
go. Two of Bertol’s friends started forward and Mike swung
the light across their shins. One dropped to his knees
cursing and the other hopped away holding his leg and
hooting.

A crowd had gathered. They laughed as Mike swept off his
fool’s cap in another bow. “I thank you,” said Mike. “My
mother thanks you.”

Siri’s cousin strained against his rage. Froths of spittle
spilled on his lips and chin. | pushed through the crowd and
stepped between Mike and the tall colonist.

“Hey, it’s all right,” | said. “We're leaving. We're going
now.”

“Goddamn it, Merin, get out of the way,” said Mike.

“It’s all right,” | said as | turned to him. “I’m with a girl
named Siri who has a...” Bertol stepped forward and lunged
past me with his blade. | wrapped my left arm around his
shoulder and flung him back. He tumbled heavily onto the
grass.

“Oh, shit,” said Mike as he backed up several paces. He
looked tired and a little disgusted as he sat down on a stone
step. “Aw, damn,” he said softly. There was a short line of
crimson in one of the black patches on the left side of his
Harlequin costume. As | watched, the narrow slit spilled over
and blood ran down across Mike Osho’s broad belly.

“Oh, Jesus, Mike.” | tore a strip of fabric from my shirt and
tried to staunch the flow. | could remember none of the first
aid we’d been taught as midShipmen. | pawed at my wrist
but my comlog was not there. We had left them on the Los
Angeles.

“It’s not so bad, Mike,” | gasped. “It’s just a little cut.” The
blood flowed down over my hand and wrist.

“It will serve,” said Mike. His voice was held taut by a cord
of pain. “Damn. A fucking sword. Do you believe it, Merin?
Cut down in the prime of my prime by a piece of fucking
cutlery out of a fucking one-penny opera. Oh, damn, that
smarts.”

“Three-penny opera,” | said and changed hands. The rag
was soaked.

“You know what your fucking problem is, Merin? You’re
always sticking your fucking two cents in. Awwwww.” Mike’s
face went white and then gray. He lowered his chin to his
chest and breathed deeply. “To he// with this, kid. Let’s go
home, huh?”

| looked over my shoulder. Bertol was slowly moving away
with his friends. The rest of the crowd milled around in
Shock. “Call a doctor!” | screamed. “Get some medics up
here!” Two men ran down the street. There was no sign of
Siri.

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” said Mike in a stronger
voice as if he had forgotten something important. “Just a
minute,” he said and died.

Died. A real death. Brain death. His mouth opened
obscenely, his eyes rolled back so only the whites showed,

and a minute later the blood ceased pumping from the
wound.

For a few mad seconds | cursed the sky. | could see the L.A.
moving across the fading starfield and | knew that | could
bring Mike back if | could get him there in a few minutes.
The crowd backed away as | screamed and ranted at the
stars.

Eventually | turned to Bertol. “You,” | said.

The young man had stopped at the far end of the
Common. His face was ashen. He stared wordlessly.

“You,” | said again. | picked up the laser pen from where it
had rolled, clicked the power to maximum, and walked to
where Bertol and his friends stood waiting.

Later, through the haze of screams and scorched flesh, |
was dimly aware of Siri’s skimmer setting down in the
crowded square, of dust flying up all around, and of her
voice commanding me to join her. We lifted away from the
light and madness. The cool wind blew my sweat-soaked
hair away from my neck.

“We will go to Fevarone,” said Siri. “Bertol was drunk. The
Separatists are a small, violent group. There will be no
reprisals. You will stay with me until the Council holds the
inquest.”

“No,” | said “There. Land there.” | pointed to a spit of land
not far from the’ city.

Siri landed despite her protests. | glanced at the boulder
to make sure the backpack was still there and then climbed
out of the skimmer. Siri slid across the seat and pulled my
head down to hers. “Merin, my love.” Her lips were warm and
open but I felt nothing. My body felt anesthetized. | stepped
back and waved her away. She brushed her hair back and
stared at me from green eyes filled with tears. Then the
Skimmer lifted, turned, and sped to the south in the early
morning light.

Just a minute, | felt like calling. | sat on a rock and gripped
my knees as several ragged sobs were torn up out of me.

Then | stood and threw the laser pen into the surf below. |
tugged out the backpack and dumped the contents on the
ground.

The hawking mat was gone.

| sat back down, too drained to laugh or cry or walk away.
The sun rose as | sat there. | was still sitting there three
hours later when the large black skimmer from ShipSecurity
set down silently beside me.

“Father? Father, it is getting late.”

| turn to see my son Donel standing behind me. He is
wearing the blue and gold robe of the Hegemony Council.
His bald scalp is flushed and beaded with sweat. Doner is
only forty-three but he seems much older to me.

“Please, Father,” he says. | nod and rise, brushing off the
grass and dirt. We walk together to the front of the tomb.
The crowd has pressed closer now. Gravel crunches under
their feet as they shift restlessly. “Shall | enter with you,
Father?” Donel asks.

| pause to look at this aging stranger who is my child.
There is little of Siri or me reflected in him. His face is
friendly, florid, and tense with the excitement of the day. |
can sense in him the open honesty which often takes the
place of intelligence in some people. | cannot help but
compare this balding puppy of a man to Alón—Alón of the
dark curls and silences and sardonic smile. But Alon is thirty-
three years dead, cut down in a stupid battle which had
nothing to do with him.

“No,” | say “lIl go in by myself. Thank you, Donel.”

He nods and steps back. The pennants snap above the
heads of the straining crowd. | turn my attention to the
tomb.

The entrance is sealed with a palmlock. | have only to
touch it.

During the past few minutes | have developed a fantasy
which will save me from both the growing sadness within
and the external series of events which | have initiated. Siri
is not dead. In the last stages of her illness she had called
together the doctors and the few technicians left in the
colony and they rebuilt for her one of the ancient
hibernation chambers used in their seedship two centuries
earlier. Siri is only sleeping. What is more, the year-long
sleep has somehow restored her youth. When | wake her she
will be the Siri | remember from our early days. We will walk
out into the sunlight together and when the farcaster doors
open we Shall be the first through.

“Father?”

“Yes.” | step forward and set my hand to the door of the
crypt. There is a whisper of electric motors and the white
slab of stone slides back. | bow my head and enter Siri’s
tomb.

“Damn it, Merin, secure that line before it knocks you
overboard. Hurry!” | hurried. The wet rope was hard to coil,
harder to tie off. Siri shook her head in disgust and leaned
over to tie a bowline knot with one hand.

It was our Sixth Reunion. | had been three months too late
for her birthday but more than five thousand other people
had made it to the celebration. The CEO of the All Thing had
wished her well in a forty-minute speech. A poet read his
most recent verses to the Love Cycle sonnets. The
Hegemony Ambassador had presented her with a scroll and
a new ship, a small submersible powered by the first fusion
cells to be allowed on Maui-Covenant.

Siri had eighteen other ships. Twelve belonged to her fleet
of swift catamarans that plied their trade between the
wandering Archipelago and the home islands. Two were
beautiful racing yachts that were used only twice a year to
win the Founder’s Regatta and the Covenant Criterium. The

other four craft were ancient fishing boats, homely and
awkward, well maintained but little more than scows.

Siri had nineteen ships but we were on a fishing boat—the
Ginnie Paul. For the past eight days we had fished the shelf
of the Equatorial Shallows; a crew of two, casting and pulling
nets, wading knee-deep through stinking fish and crunching
trilobites, wallowing over every wave, casting and pulling
nets, keeping watch, and sleeping like exhausted children
during our brief rest periods. | was not quite twenty-three. |
thought | was used to heavy labor aboard the L.A. and it was
my custom to put in an hour of exercise in the 1.3-g pod
every second shift, but now my arms and back ached from
the strain and my hands were blistered between the
calluses. Siri had just turned seventy.

“Merin, go forward and reef the foresail. Do the same for
the jib and then go below to see to the sandwiches. Plenty of
mustard.”

| nodded and went forward. For a day and a half we had
been playing hide-and-seek with a storm: sailing before it
when we could, turning about and accepting its punishment
when we had to. At first it had been exciting, a welcome
respite from the endless casting and pulling and mending.
But after the first few hours the adrenaline rush faded to be
replaced by constant nausea, fatigue, and a terrible
tiredness. The seas did not relent. The waves grew to six
meters and higher. The Ginnie Paul wallowed like the broad-
beamed matron she was. Everything was wet. My skin was
soaked under three layers of rain gear. For Siri it was a long-
awaited vacation.

“This is nothing,” she had said during the darkest hour of
the night as waves washed over the deck and smashed
against the scarred plastic of the cockpit. “You should see it
during simoon season.”

The clouds still hung low and blended into gray waves in
the distance but the sea was down to a gentle five-foot
chop. | soread mustard across the roast beef sandwiches and

poured steaming coffee into thick white mugs. It would have
been easier to transport the coffee in zero-g without spilling
it than to get up the pitching shaft of the companionway. Siri
accepted her depleted cup without commenting. We sat in
silence for a bit, appreciating the food and the tongue-
scalding warmth. | took the wheel when Siri went below to
refill our mugs. The gray day was dimming almost
imperceptibly into night.

“Merin,” she said after handing me my mug and taking a
seat on the long cushioned bench which encircled the
cockpit, “what will happen after they open the farcaster?”

| was surprised by the question. We had almost never
talked about the time when Maui-Covenant would join the
Hegemony. | glanced over at Siri and was struck by how
ancient she suddenly seemed. Her face was a mosaic of
seams and shadows. Her beautiful green eyes had sunken
into wells of darkness and her cheekbones were knife edges
against brittle parchment. She kept her gray hair cut short
now and it stuck out in damp spikes. Her neck and wrists
were tendoned cords emerging from a shapeless sweater.

“What do you mean?” | asked.

“What will happen after they open the farcaster?”

“You know what the Council says, Siri.” | spoke loudly
because she was hard of hearing in one ear. “It will open a
new era of trade and technology for Maui-Covenant. And you
won’t be restricted to one little world any longer. When you
become citizens, everyone will be entitled to use the
farcaster doors.”

“Yes,” said Siri. Her voice was weary. “I have heard all of
that, Merin. But what will happen? Who will be the first
through to us?”

| shrugged. “More diplomats, | suppose. Cultural contact
specialists. Anthropologists. Ethnologists. Marine biologists.”

“And then?”

| paused. It was dark out. The sea was almost gentle. Our
running lights glowed red and green against the night. | felt

the same anxiety | had known two days earlier when the
wall of storm appeared on the horizon. | said, “And then will
come the missionaries. The petroleum geologists. The sea
farmers. The developers.”

Siri sipped at her coffee. “I would have thought your
Hegemony was far beyond a petroleum economy.”

| laughed and locked the wheel in. “Nobody gets beyond a
petroleum economy. Not while there’s petroleum there. We
don’t burn it, if that’s what you mean. But it’s still essential
for the production of plastics, synthetics, food base, and
keroids. Two hundred billion people use a lot of plastic.”

“And Maui-Covenant has oil?”

“Oh, yes,” | said. There was no more laughter in me.
“There are billions of barrels reservoired under the
Equatorial Shallows alone.”

“How will they get it, Merin? Platforms?”

“Yeah. Platforms. Submersibles. Sub-sea colonies with
tailored workers brought in from Mare Infinitus.”

“And the motile isles?” asked Siri. “They must return each
year to the shallows to feed on the bluekelp there and to
reproduce. What will become of the isles?”

| shrugged again. | had drunk too much coffee and it had
left a bitter taste in my mouth. “I don’t know,” | said. “They
haven't told the crew much. But back on our first trip out,
Mike heard that they planned to develop as many of the
isles as they can so some will be protected.”

“Develop?” Siri’s voice showed surprise for the first time.
“How can they develop the isles? Even the First Families
must ask permission of the Sea Folk to build our treehouse
retreats there.”

| smiled at Siri’s use of the local term for the dolphins. The
Maui-Covenant colonists were such children when it came to
their damned dolphins. “The plans are all set,” | said. “There
are 128,573 motile isles big enough to build a dwelling on.
Leases to those have long since been sold. The smaller isles

will be broken up, | suppose. The home islands will be
developed for recreation purposes.”

“Recreation purposes,” echoed Siri. “How many people
from the Hegemony will use the farcaster to come here ... for
recreation purposes?”

“At first, you mean?” | asked. “Just a few thousand the first
year. As long as the only door is on Island 241 ... the Trade
Center ... it will be limited. Perhaps fifty thousand the
second year when Firstsite gets its door. It’ll be quite the
luxury tour. Always is after a seed colony is first opened to
the Web.”

“And later?”

“After the five-year probation? There will be thousands of
doors, of course. | would imagine that there will be twenty or
thirty million new residents coming through during the first
year of full citizenship.”

“Twenty or thirty million,” said Siri. The light from the
compass stand illuminated her lined face from below. There
was still a beauty there. But there was no anger or shock. |
had expected both.

“But you'll be citizens then yourself,” | said. “Free to step
anywhere in the Worldweb. There will be sixteen new worlds
to choose from. Probably more by then.”

“Yes,” said Siri and set aside her empty mug. A fine rain
streaked the glass around us. The crude radar screen set in
its hand-carved frame showed the seas empty, the storm
past. “Is it true, Merin, that people in the Hegemony have
their homes on a dozen worlds? One house, | mean, with
windows facing out on a dozen skies?”

“Sure,” | said. “But not many people. Only the rich can
afford multiworld residences like that.”

Siri smiled and set her hand on my knee. The back of her
hand was mottled and blue-veined. “But you are very rich,
are you not, Shipman?”

| looked away. “Not yet I’m not.”

“Ah, but soon, Merin, soon. How long for you, my love?
Less than two weeks here and then the voyage back to your
Hegemony. Five months more of your time to bring the last
components back, a few weeks to finish, and then you step
home a rich man. Step two hundred empty light-years home.
What a strange thought ... but where was I? That is how
long? Less than a standard year.”

“Ten months,” | said. “Three hundred and six standard
days. Three hundred fourteen of yours. Nine hundred
eighteen shifts.”

“And then your exile will be over.”

“Yes.”

“And you will be twenty-four years old and very rich.”

“Yes.”

“I’m tired, Merin. | want to sleep now.”

We programmed the tiller, set the collision alarm, and
went below. The wind had risen some and the old vessel
wallowed from wave crest to trough with every swell. We
undressed in the dim light of the swinging lamp. | was first
in the bunk and under the covers. It was the first time Siri
and | had shared a sleep period. Remembering our last
Reunion and her shyness at the villa, | expected her to
douse the light. Instead she stood a minute, nude in the chill
air, thin arms calmly at her sides.

Time had claimed Siri but had not ravaged her. Gravity
had done its inevitable work on her breasts and buttocks
and she was much thinner. | stared at the gaunt outlines of
ribs and breastbone and remembered the sixteen-year-old
girl with baby fat and skin like warm velvet. In the cold light
of the swinging lamp | stared at Siri’s sagging flesh and
remembered moonlight on budding breasts. Yet somehow,
strangely, inexplicably, it was the same Siri who stood
before me now.

“Move over, Merin.” She slipped into the bunk beside me.
The sheets were cool against our skin, the rough blanket
welcome. | turned off the light. The little ship swayed to the

regular rhythm of the sea’s breathing. | could hear the
sympathetic creak of masts and rigging. In the morning we
would be casting and pulling and mending but now there
was time to sleep. | began to doze to the sound of waves
against wood.

“Merin?”

“Yes.”

“What would happen if the Separatists attacked the
Hegemony tourists or the new residents?”

“I thought the Separatists had all been carted off to the
isles.”

“They have been. But what if they resisted?”

“The Hegemony would send in FORCE troops Who could
kick the shit out of the Separatists.”

“What if the farcaster itself were attacked ... destroyed
before it was operational?”

“Impossibles.”

“Yes, | know, but what if it were?”

“Then the Los Angeles would return nine months later with
Hegemony troops who would proceed to kick the shit out of
the Separatists ... and anyone else on Maui-Covenant who
got in their way.”

“Nine months’ shiptime,” said Siri. “Eleven years of our
time.”

“But inevitable either way,” | said. “Let’s talk about
something else.”

“All right,” said Siri but we did not speak. | listened to the
creak and sigh of the ship Siri had nestled in the hollow of
my arm. Her head was on my shoulder and her breathing
was so deep and regular that | thought her to be asleep. |
was almost asleep myself when her warm hand slid up my
leg and lightly cupped me. | was startled even as | began to
stir and stiffen. Siri whispered an answer to my unasked
question. “No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not
too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my
love. | will be content either way.”

| decided. Toward the dawn we slept.

The tomb is empty.

“Donel, come in here!”

He bustles in, robes rustling in the hollow emptiness. The
tomb is empty. There is no hibernation chamber—|I did not
truly expect there to be one—but neither is there
sarcophagus or coffin. A bright bulb illuminates the white
interior. “What the hell is this, Donel? | thought this was
Siri’s tomb.”

“It is, Father.”

“Where is she interred? Under the floor for Chrissake?”

Donel mops at his brow. | remember that it is his mother |
am speaking of. | also remember that he has had almost two
years to accustom himself to the idea of her death.

“No one told you?” he asks.

“Told me what?” The anger and confusion are already
ebbing. “I was rushed here from the dropship station and
told that | was to visit Siri’s tomb before the farcaster
opening. What?”

“Mother was cremated as per her instructions. Her ashes
were spread on the Great South Sea from the highest
platform of the family isle.”

“Then why this ... crypt?” | watch what | say. Donel is
sensitive.

He mops his brow again and glances to the door. We are
Shielded from the view of the crowd but we are far behind
schedule. Already the other members of the Council have
had to hurry down the hill to join the dignitaries on the
bandstand. My slow grief this day has been worse than bad
timing—it has turned into bad theater.

“Mother left instructions. They were carried out.” He
touches a panel on the inner wall and it slides up to reveal a
small niche containing a metal box. My name is on it.

“What is that?”

Donel shakes his head. “Personal items Mother left for you.
Only Magritte knew the details and she died last winter
without telling anyone.”

“All right,” | say. “Thank you. l'Il be out in a moment.”

Donel glances at his chronometer. “The ceremony begins
in eight minutes. They will activate the farcaster in twenty
minutes.”

“| know,” | say. | do Know. Part of me knows precisely how
much time is left. “lII be out in a moment.”

Donel hesitates and then departs. | close the door behind
him with a touch of my palm. The metal box is surprisingly
heavy. | set it on the stone floor and crouch beside it. A
smaller palmlock gives me access. The lid clicks open and |
peer into the container.

“Well l'II be damned,” | say softly. | do not know what |
expected—artifacts perhaps, nostalgic mementos of our
hundred and three days together—perhaps a pressed flower
from some forgotten offering or the firenchhorn conch we
dove for off Fevarone. But there are no mementos—not as
such.

The box holds a small Steiner-Ginn handlaser, one of the
most powerful projection weapons ever made. The
accumulator is attached by a power lead to a small fusion
cell that Siri must have cannibalized from her new
submersible. Also attached to the fusion cell is an ancient
comlog, an antique with a solid state interior and a liquid
crystal diskey. The charge indicator glows green.

There are two other objects in the box. One is the
translator medallion we had used so long ago. The final
object makes me literally gape in surprise.

“Why, you little bitch,” | say. Things fall into place. |
Cannot stop a smile. “You dear, conniving, little bitch.”

There, rolled carefully, power lead correctly attached, lies
the hawking mat Mike Osho bought in Carvnel Marketplace
for thirty marks. | leave the hawking mat there, disconnect
the comlog, and lift it out. | sit cross-legged on the cold

stone and thumb the diskey. The light in the crypt fades out
and suddenly Siri is there before me.

They did not throw me off the ship when Mike died. They
could have but they did not. They did not leave me to the
mercy of provincial justice on Maui-Covenant. They could
have but they chose not to. For two days | was held in
Security and questioned, once by Shipmaster Singh himself.
Then they let me return to duty. For the four months of the
long leap back | tortured myself with the memory of Mike’s
murder. | knew that in my clumsy way | had helped to
murder him. | put in my shifts, dreamed my sweaty
nightmares, and wondered if they would dismiss me when
we reached the Web. They could have told me but they
chose not to.

They did not dismiss me. | was to have my normal leave in
the Web but could take no off-Ship R and R while in the
Maui-Covenant system. In addition, there was a written
reprimand and temporary reduction in rank. That was what
Mike’s life had been worth—a reprimand and reduction in
rank.

| took my three-week leave with the rest of the crew but,
unlike the others, | did not plan to return. | farcast to
Esperance and made the classic Shipman’s mistake of trying
to visit family. Two days in the crowded residential bulb was
enough and | stepped to Lusus and took my pleasure in
three days of whoring on the Rue des Chats. When my mood
turned darker | ’cast to Fuji and lost most of my ready marks
betting on the bloody samurai fights there.

Finally | found myself farcasting to Homesystem Station
and taking the two-day pilgrim shuttle down to Hellas Basin.
| had never been to Homesystem or Mars before and | never
plan to return, but the ten days | spent there, alone and
wandering the dusty, haunted corridors of the Monastery,
served to send me back to the ship. Back to Siri.

Occasionally | would leave the red-stoned maze of the
megalith and, clad only in skinsuit and mask, stand on one
of the uncounted thousands of stone balconies and stare
Skyward at the pale gray star which had once been Old
Earth. Sometimes then | thought of the brave and stupid
idealists heading out into the great dark in their slow and
leaking ships, carrying embryos and ideologies with equal
faith and care. But most times | did not try to think. Most
times | simply stood in the purple night and let Siri come to
me. There in the Master’s Rock, where perfect satori had
eluded so many much worthier pilgrims, | achieved it
through the memory of a not quite sixteen-year-old
womanchild’s body lying next to mine while moonlight
spilled from a Thomas Hawk’s wings.

When the Los Angeles spun back up to a quantum state, |
went with her. Four months later | was content to pull my
shift with the construction crew, plug into my usual stims,
and sleep my R and R away. Then Singh came to me. “You’re
going down,” he said. | did not understand. “In the past
eleven years the groundlings have turned your screw-up
with Osho into a goddamned legend,” said Singh. “There’s
an entire cultural mythos built around your little roll in the
hay with that colonial girl.”

“Siri,” | said.

“Get your gear,” said Singh. “You’ll spend your three
weeks groundside. The Ambassador’s experts say you'll do
the Hegemony more good down there than up here. We'll
see.”

The world was waiting. Crowds were cheering. Siri was
waving. We left the harbor in a yellow catamaran and sailed
south-southeast, bound for the Archipelago and her family
isle.

“Hello, Merin.” Siri floats in the darkness of her tomb. The
holo is not perfect; a haziness mars the edges. But it is Siri—

Siri as | last saw her, gray hair shorn rather than cut, head
high, face sharpened with shadows. “Hello, Merin, my love.”

“Hello, Siri,” | say. The tomb door is closed.

“I am sorry | cannot share our Seventh Reunion, Merin. |
looked forward to it.” Siri pauses and looks down at her
hands. The image flickers slightly as dust motes float
through her form. “I had carefully planned what to say here,”
she goes on. “How to say it. Arguments to be pled.
Instructions to be given. But | know now how useless that
would have been. Either | have said it already and you have
heard or there is nothing left to say and silence would best
suit the moment.”

Siri’s voice had grown even more beautiful with age. There
is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from
knowing pain. Siri moves her hands and they disappear
beyond the border of the projection. “Merin, my love, how
strange our days apart and together have been. How
beautifully absurd the myth that bound us. My days were
but heartbeats to you. | hated you for that. You were the
mirror that would not lie. If you could have seen your face at
the beginning of each Reunion! The least you could have
done was to hide your shock ... that, at least, you could have
done for me.

“But through your clumsy naivete there has always
been ... what? ... something, Merin. There is something there
that belies the callowness and thoughtless egotism which
you wear so well. A caring, perhaps. A respect for caring, if
nothing else.

“Merin, this diary has hundreds of entries ... thousands, |
fear ... | have kept it since | was thirteen. By the time you
see this, they will all have been erased except the ones
which follow. Adieu, my love. Adieu.”

| shut off the comlog and sit in silence for a minute. The
crowd sounds are barely audible through the thick walls of

the tomb. | take a breath and thumb the diskey.

Siri appears. She is in her late forties. | know immediately
the day and place she recorded this image. | remember the
cloak she wears, the eelstone pendant at her neck, and the
strand of hair which has escaped her barrette and even now
falls across her cheek. | remember everything about that
day. It was the last day of our Third Reunion and we were
with friends on the heights above South Tern. Donel was ten
and we were trying to convince him to slide on the snowfield
with us. He was crying. Siri turned away from us even before
the skimmer settled. When Magritte stepped out we knew
from Siri’s face that something had happened.

The same face stares at me now. She brushes absently at
the unruly strand of hair. Her eyes are red but her voice is
controlled. “Merin, they killed our son today.” Alón was
twenty-one and they killed him. You were so confused today,
Merin. ‘How could such a mistake have happened?’ you kept
repeating. You did not really know our son but | could see
the loss in your face when we heard. Merin, it was not an
accident. If nothing else survives, no other record, if you
never understand why | allowed a sentimental myth to rule
my life, let this be known—/t was not an accident that killed
Alon. He was with the Separatists when the Council police
arrived. Even then he could have escaped. We had prepared
an alibi together. The police would have believed his story.
He chose to stay.

“Today, Merin, you were impressed with what | said to the
crowd ... the mob ... at the embassy. Know this, Shipman—
when | said, ‘Now is not the time to show your anger and
your hatred,’ that is precisely what | meant. No more, no
less. Today is not the time. But the day will come. It will
surely come. The Covenant was not taken lightly in those
final days, Merin. It is not taken lightly now. Those who have
forgotten will be surprised when the day comes but it will
surely come.”

The image fades to another and in the split second of
overlap the face of a _ twenty-six-year-old Siri appears
superimposed on the older woman’s features. “Merin, | am
pregnant. I’m so glad. You’ve been gone five weeks now and
| miss you. Ten years you'll be gone. More than that. Merin,
why didn’t you think to invite me to go with you? | could not
have gone but | would have loved it if you had just invited
me. But I’m pregnant, Merin.; The doctors say that it will be
a boy. | will tell him about you, my love. Perhaps someday
you and he will sail in the Archipelago and listen to the
songs of the Sea Folk as you and | have done these past few
weeks. Perhaps you'll understand them by then. Merin, |
miss you. Please hurry back.”

The holographic image shimmers and shifts. The sixteen-
year-old girl is red-faced. Her long hair cascades over bare
shoulders and a white nightgown. She speaks in a rush,
racing tears. “Shipman Merin Aspic, I’m sorry about your

friend—I really am—but you left without even saying
goodbye. | had such plans about how you would help
us ... how you and |... you didn’t even say goodbye. | don’t

care what happens to you. | hope you go back to your
stinking, crowded Hegemony hives and rot for all | care. In
fact, Merin Aspic, | wouldn’t want to see you again even if
they paid me. Goodbye.”

She turns her back’ before the projection fades. It is dark
in the tomb now but the audio continues for a second. There
is a soft chuckle and Siri’s voice—I cannot tell the age—
comes one last time. “Adieu, Merin. Adieu.”

“Adieu,” | say and thumb the diskey off.

The crowd parts as | emerge blinking from the tomb. My
poor timing has ruined the drama of the event and now the
smile on my face incites angry whispers. Loudspeakers carry
the rhetoric of the official ceremony even to our hilltop. “...

beginning a new era of cooperation,” echoes the rich voice
of the Ambassador.

| set the box on the grass and remove the hawking mat.
The crowd presses forward to see as | unroll the carpet. The
tapestry is faded but the flight threads gleam like new
copper. | sit in the center of the mat and slide the heavy box
on behind me.

“.. and more will follow until space and time will cease to
be obstacles.”

The crowd moves back as | tap the flight design and the
hawking mat rises four meters into the air. Now | can see
beyond the roof of the tomb. The islands are returning to
form the Equatorial Archipelago. | can see them, hundreds of
them, borne up out of the hungry south by gentle winds.

“So it is with great pleasure that | close this circuit and
welcome you, the colony of Maui-Covenant, into the
community of the Hegemony of Man.”

The thin thread of the ceremonial comm-laser pulses to
the zenith. There is a pattering of applause and the band
begins playing. | squint skyward just in time to see a new
star being born. Part of me knew to the microsecond what
has just occurred.

For a few microseconds the farcaster had been functional.
For a few microseconds time and space had ceased to be
obstacles. Then the massive tidal pull of the artificial
singularity triggered the thermite charge | had placed on the
outer containment sphere. That tiny explosion had not been
visible but a second later the expanding Swarzschild radius
is eating its shell, swallowing thirty-six thousand tons of
fragile dodecahedron, and growing quickly to gobble several
thousand kilometers of space around it. And that is visible—
magnificently visible—as a miniature nova flares whitely in
the clear blue sky.

The band stops playing. People scream and run for cover.
There is no reason to. There is a burst of X rays tunneling out

as the farcaster continues to collapse into itself, but not
enough to cause harm through Maui-Covenant’s generous
atmosphere. A second streak of plasma becomes visible as
the Los Angeles puts more distance between itself and the
rapidly decaying little black hole. The winds rise and the
seas are choppier. There will be strange tides tonight.

| want to say something profound but | can think of
nothing. Besides, the crowd is in no mood to listen. | tell
myself that | can hear some cheers mixed in with the
screams and shouts.

| tap at the flight designs and the hawking mat speeds out
over the cliff and above the harbor. A Thomas Hawk lazing
on midday thermals flaps in panic at my approach.

“Let them come!” | shout at the fleeing hawk. “Let them
come! l'Il be thirty-five and not alone and let them come if
they dare!” | drop my fist and laugh. The wind is blowing my
hair and cooling the sweat on my chest and arms.

Cooler now, | take a sighting and set my course for the
most distant of the isles. | look forward to meeting the
others. Even more, | look forward to talking to the Sea Folk
and telling them that it is time for the Shark to come at last
to the seas of Maui-Covenant.

Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, |
will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.

The cascade of light from the distant space battle
continued. There was no sound except for the slide of wind
across escarpments. The group sat close together, leaning
forward and looking at the antique comlog as if expecting
more.

There was no more. The Consul removed the micro-disk
and pocketed it.

Sol Weintraub rubbed the back of his sleeping infant and
spoke to the Consul. “Surely you’re not Merin Aspic.”

“No,” said the Consul. “Merin Aspic died during the
Rebellion. Siri’s Rebellion.”

“How did you come to possess this recording?” asked
Father Hoyt. Through the priest’s mask of pain, it was visible
that he had been moved. “This incredible recording ...”

“He gave it to me,” said the Consul. “A few weeks before
he was killed in the Battle of the Archipelago.” The Consul
looked at the uncomprehending faces before him. “I’m their
grandson,” he said. “Siri’s and Merin’s. My father ... the
Donel whom Aspic mentions ... became the first Home Rule
Councilor when Maui-Covenant was admitted to the
Protectorate. Later he was elected Senator and served until
his death. | was nine years old that day on the hill near Siri’s
tomb. | was twenty—old enough to join the rebels and fight
—when Aspic came to our isle at night, took me aside, and
forbade me to join their band.”

“Would you have fought?” asked Brawne Lamia.

“Oh, yes. And died. Like a third of our menfolk and a fifth
of our women. Like all of the dolphins and many of the isles
themselves, although the Hegemony tried to keep as many
of those intact as possible.”

“It is a moving document,” said Sol Weintraub. “But why
are you here? Why the pilgrimage to the Shrike?”

“lam not finished,” said the Consul. “Listen.”

My father was as weak as my grandmother had been
strong. The Hegemony did not wait eleven local years to
return—the FORCE torchships were in orbit before five years
had elapsed. Father watched as the rebels’ hastily
constructed ships were swatted aside. He continued to
defend the Hegemony as they laid siege to our world. |
remember when I was fifteen, watching with my family from
the upper deck of our ancestral isle as a dozen other islands
burned in the distance, the Hegemony skimmers lighting

the sea with their depth charges. In the morning, the waves
were gray with the bodies of the dead dolphins.

My older sister Lira went to fight with the rebels in those
hopeless days after the Battle of the Archipelago.
Eyewitnesses saw her die. Her body was never recovered.
My father never mentioned her name again.

Within three years after the cease-fire and admission to
the Protectorate, we original colonists were a minority on
our own world. The isles were tamed and sold to tourists,
just as Merin had predicted to Siri. Firstsite is a city of
eleven million now, the condos and spires and EM cities
extending around the entire island along the coast. Firstsite
Harbor remains as a quaint bazaar, with descendants of the
First Families selling crafts and overpriced art there.

We lived on Tau Ceti Center for a while when Father was
first elected Senator, and I finished school there. | was the
dutiful son, extolling the virtues of life in the Web, studying
the glorious history of the Hegemony of Man, and preparing
for my own career in the diplomatic corps.

And all the time | waited.

| returned to Maui-Covenant briefly after graduation,
working in the offices on Central Administration Isle. Part of
my job was to visit the hundreds of drilling platforms going
up in the shallows, to report on the rapidly multiplying
undersea complexes, and to act as liaison with the
development corporations coming in from TC? and Sol
Draconi Septem. | did not enjoy the work. But | was efficient.
And I smiled. And I waited.

| courted and married a girl from one of the First Families,
from Siri’s cousin Bertol’s line, and after receiving a rare
“First” on diplomatic corps examinations, | requested a post
out of the Web.

Thus began our personal Diaspora, Gresha’s and mine. |
was efficient. | was born to diplomacy. Within five standard
years | was an Under Consul. Within eighty a Consul in my

own right. As long as I stayed in the Outback, this was as far
as | would rise.

It was my choice. | worked for the Hegemony. And |
waited.

At first my role was to provide Web ingenuity to help the
colonists do what they do best—destroy truly indigenous
life. It is no accident that in six centuries of interstellar
expansion the Hegemony has encountered no species
considered intelligent on the Drake-Turing-Chen Index. On
Old Earth, it had long been accepted that if a species put
mankind on its food-chain menu the species would be
extinct before long. As the Web expanded, if a species
attempted serious competition with humanity’s intellect,
that species would be extinct before the first farcaster
opened in-system.

On Whirl we stalked the elusive zeplen through their cloud
towers. It is possible that they were not sapient by human or
Core standards. But they were beautiful. When they died,
rippling in rainbow colors, their many-hued messages
unseen, unheard by their fleeing herdmates, the beauty of
their death agony was beyond words. We sold their
photoreceptive skins to Web corporations, their flesh to
worlds like Heaven’s Gate, and ground their bones to
powder to sell as aphrodisiacs to the impotent and
superstitious on a score of other colony worlds.

On Garden | was adviser to the arcology engineers who
drained Grand Fen, ending the short reign of the marsh
centaurs who had ruled—and threatened Hegemony
progress—there. They tried to migrate in the end, but the
North Reaches were far too dry and when | visited the
region decades later, when Garden entered the Web, the
desiccated remains of the centaurs still littered some of the
distant Reaches like the husks of exotic plants from some
more colorful era.

On Hebron | arrived just as the Jewish settlers were ending
their long feud with the Seneschai Aluit, creatures as fragile

as that world’s waterless ecology. The Aluit were empathic
and it was our fear and greed which killed them—that and
our unbreachable alienness. But on Hebron it was not the
death of the Aluit which turned my heart to stone, but my
part in dooming the colonists themselves.

On Old Earth they had a word for what | was—guisling.
For, although Hebron was not my world, the settlers who
had fled there had done so for reasons as clear as those of
my ancestors who signed the Covenant of Life on the Old
Earth island of Maui. But | was waiting. And in my waiting |
acted... in all senses of the word.

They trusted me. They grew to believe in my candid
revelations of how wonderful it was to rejoin the community
of mankind ... to join the Web. They insisted that only the
one city might be open to foreigners. | smiled and agreed.
And now New Jerusalem holds sixty millions while the
continent holds ten million Jewish indigenies, dependent
upon the Web city for most of what they need. Another
decade. Perhaps less.

| broke down a bit after Hebron was opened to the Web. |
discovered alcohol, the blessed antithesis of Flashback and
wireheading. Gresha stayed with me in the hospital there
until | dried out. Oddly, for a Jewish world, the clinic was
Catholic. | remember the rustle of robes in the halls at night.

My breakdown had been very quiet and very far away. My
career was not damaged. As full Consul, | took my wife and
son to Bressia.

How delicate our role there! How Byzantine the fine line
we walked. For decades, Colonel Kassad, forces of the
TechnoCore had been harassing the Ouster swarms
whenever they fled. Now the forces-that-be in the Senate
and Al Advisory Council had determined that some test had
to be made of Ouster might in the Outback itself. Bressia
was chosen. | admit, the Bressians had been our surrogates
for decades before I| arrived. Their society was archaically
and delightfully Prussian, militaristic to a fault, arrogant in

their economic pretensions, xenophobic to the point of
happily enlisting to wipe out the “Ouster Menace.” At first, a
few lend-lease torchships so that they could reach the
swarms. Plasma weapons. Impact probes with tailored
viruses.

It was a slight miscalculation that | was still on Bressia
when the Ouster hordes arrived. A few months’ difference. A
military-political analysis team should have been there in
my place.

It did not matter. Hegemony purposes were served. The
resolve and rapid-deployment capabilities of FORCE were
properly tested where no real harm was done to Hegemony
interests. Gresha died, of course. In the first bombardment.
And Alón, my ten-year-old son. He had been with me ... had
survived the war itself... only to die when some FORCE idiot
set off a booby trap or demolition charge too near the
refugee barracks in Buckminster, the capital.

I was not with him when he died.

| was promoted after Bressia. | was given the most
challenging and sensitive assignment ever relegated to
someone of mere consular rank: diplomat in charge of direct
negotiations with the Ousters themselves.

First | was ‘cast to Tau Ceti Center for long conferences
with Senator Gladstone’s committee and some of the Al
Councilors | met with Gladstone herself. The plan was very
complicated. Essentially the Ousters had to be provoked
into attacking, and the key to that provocation was the
world of Hyperion.

The Ousters had been observing Hyperion since before
the Battle of Bressia. Our intelligence suggested that they
were obsessed with the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Their
attack on the Hegemony hospital ship carrying Colonel
Kassad, among others, had been a miscalculation; their ship
captain had panicked when the hospital ship had been
mistakenly identified as a military spinship. Worse, from the
Ousters point of view, was the fact that by setting their

dropships down near the Tombs themselves, the same
commander had revealed their ability to defy the time tides.
After the Shrike had decimated their commando teams, the
torchship captain returned to the Swarm to be executed.

But our intelligence suggested that the Ouster
miscalculation had not been a total disaster. Valuable
information had been obtained about the Shrike. And their
obsession with Hyperion had deepened.

Gladstone explained to me how the Hegemony planned to
capitalize on that obsession.

The essence of the plan was that the Ousters had to be
provoked into attacking the Hegemony. The focus of that
attack was to be Hyperion itself. | was made to understand
that the resulting battle had more to do with internal Web
politics than with the Ousters. Elements of the TechnoCore
had opposed Hyperions entry into the Hegemony for
centuries. Gladstone explained that this was no longer in
the interest of humanity and that a forcible annexation of
Hyperion—under the guise of defending the Web itself—
would allow more progressive Al coalitions in the Core to
gain power. This shift of the power balance in the Core
would benefit the Senate and the Web in ways not fully
explained to me. The Ousters would be eradicated as a
potential menace once and for all. A new era of Hegemony
glory would begin.

Gladstone explained that | need not volunteer, that the
mission would be fraught with dangers—both for my career
and my life. | accepted anyway.

The Hegemony provided me with a private spacecraft. |
asked for only one modification: the addition of an antique
Steinway piano.

For months | traveled alone under Hawking drive. For
more months | wandered in regions where the Ouster
Swarms regularly migrated. Eventually my ship was sensed
and seized. They accepted that I was a courier and knew
that | was a spy. They debated killing me and did not. They

debated negotiating with me and eventually decided to do
SO.
| will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm—
their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust
clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and
the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous
Week. Suffice it to say that | believe the Ousters have done
what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved.
While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of
Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of
aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the
things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.

Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly
cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of
Rome’s faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.

Within ten standard months, | had told them my greatest
secret and they had told me theirs. | explained in all the
detail | could what plans for extinction had been laid for
them by Gladstone’s people. | told them what little the Web
scientists understood of the anomaly of the Time Tombs and
revealed the TechnoCore’s inexplicable fear of Hyperion. |
described how Hyperion would be a trap for them if they
dared attempt to occupy it, how every element of FORCE
would be brought to Hyperion System to crush them. |
revealed everything | knew and waited once again to die.

Instead of killing me, they told me something. They
showed me fatline intercepts, tightbeam recordings, and
their own records from the date they fled Old Earth System,
four and a half centuries earlier. Their facts were terrible
and simple.

The Big Mistake of ’38 had been no mistake. The death of
Old Earth had been deliberate, planned by elements of the
TechnoCore and their human counterparts in the fledgling
government of the Hegemony. The Hegira had been planned
in detail decades before the runaway black hole had
“accidentally” been plunged into the heart of Old Earth.

The Worldweb the All Thing, the Hegemony of Man—all of
them had been built on the most vicious type of patricide.
Now they were being maintained by a quiet and deliberate
policy of fratricide—the murder of any species with even the
slightest potential of being a competitor. And the Ousters,
the only other tribe of humanity free to wander between the
stars and the only group not dominated, by the TechnoCore,
was next on our list of extinction.

| returned to the Web. Over thirty years of Web-time had
passed. Meina Gladstone was CEO. Siri’s Rebellion was a
romantic legend, a minor footnote in the history of the
Hegemony.

| met with Gladstone. | told her many—but not all—of the
things the Ousters had revealed. | told her that they knew
that any battle for Hyperion would be a trap, but that they
were coming anyway. | told her that the Ousters wanted me
to become Consul on Hyperion so that | might be a double
agent when war came.

| did not tell her that they had promised to give me a
device which would open the Time Tombs and allow the
Shrike free rein.

CEO Gladstone had long talks with me. FORCE intelligence
agents had even longer talks with me, some lasting months.
Technologies and drugs were used to confirm that | was
telling the truth and keeping nothing back. The Ousters also
had been very good with technologies and drugs. | was
telling the truth. | was also keeping something back.

In the end, | was assigned to Hyperion. Gladstone offered
to raise the world to Protectorate status and me to an
ambassadorship. | declined both offers, although I asked if |
could keep my private spacecraft. | arrived on a regularly
scheduled spinship, and my own ship arrived several weeks
later in the belly of a visiting torchship. It was left in a
parking orbit with the understanding that | could summon it
and leave any time I wished.

Alone on Hyperion, | waited. Years passed. | allowed my
aide to govern the Outback world while | drank at Cicero’s
and waited.

The Ousters contacted me through private fatline and |
took a three weeks leave from the Consulate, brought my
ship down to an isolated place near the Sea of Grass,
rendezvoused with their scoutship near the Oort Cloud,
picked up their agent—a woman named Andil—and a trio of
technicians, and dropped down north of the Bridle Range, a
few kilometers from the Tombs themselves.

The Ousters did not have farcasters. They spent their lives
on the long marches between the stars, watching life in the
Web speed by like some film or holie set at a frenzied speed.
They were obsessed with time. The TechnoCore had given
the Hegemony the farcaster and continued to maintain it.
No human scientists or team of human scientists had come
close to understanding it. The Ousters tried. They failed. But
even in their failures they made inroads into understanding
the manipulation of space/time.

They understood the time tides, the antientropic fields
surrounding the Tombs. They could not generate such fields,
but they could shield against them and—theoretically—
collapse them. The Time Tombs and all their contents would
cease to age backward. The Tombs would “open.” The
Shrike would slip its tether, no longer connected to the
vicinity of the Tombs. Whatever else was inside would now
be freed.

The Ousters believed that the Time Tombs were artifacts
from their future, the Shrike a weapon of redemption
awaiting the proper hand to seize it. The Shrike Cult saw the
monster as an avenging angel; the Ousters saw it as a tool
of human devising, sent back through time to deliver
humanity from the TechnoCore. Andil and the technicians
were there to calibrate and experiment.

“You won't use it now?” | asked. We were standing in the
shadow of the structure called the Sphinx.

“Not now” said Andil. “When the invasion is imminent.”

“But you said it would take months for the device to
work,” | said, “for the Tombs to open.”

Andil nodded. Her eyes were a dark green. She was very
tall, and | could make out the subtle stripes of the powered
exoskeleton on her skinsuit. “Perhaps a year or longer,” she
said. “The device causes the antientropic field to decay
slowly. But once begun, the process is irrevocable. But we
will not activate it until the Ten Councils have decided that
invasion of the Web is necessary.”

“There are doubts?” | said.

“Ethical debates,” said Andil. A few meters from us, the
three technicians were covering the device with chameleon
cloth and a coded containment field. “An interstellar war will
cause the deaths of millions, perhaps billions Releasing the
Shrike into the Web will have unforeseen consequences. As
much as we need to strike at the Core, there are debates as
to which is the best way.”

| nodded and looked at the device and the valley of the
Tombs. “But once this is activated” | said, “there is no
turning back. The Shrike will be released, and you will have
to have won the war to control it?”

Andil smiled slightly. “That is true.”

| shot her then, her and the three technicians. Then |
tossed Grandmother Siri’s Steiner-Ginn laser far into the
drift dunes and sat on an empty flowfoam crate and sobbed
for several minutes. Then | walked over, used a technicians
comlog to enter the containment field, threw off the
chameleon cloth, and triggered the device.

There was no immediate change. The air held the same
rich, late-winter light. The fade Tomb glowed softly while the
Sphinx continued to stare down at nothing. The only sound
was the rasp of sand across the crates and bodies. Only a
glowing indicator on the Ouster device showed that it was
working ... had already worked.

| walked slowly back to the ship, half expecting the Shrike
to appear, half hoping that it would. | sat on the balcony of
my ship for more than an hour, watching the shadows filling
the valley and the sand covering the distant corpses. There
was no Shrike. No thorn tree. After a while I played a Bach
Prelude on the Steinway, buttoned up the ship, and rose into
space.

| contacted the Ouster ship and said that there had been
an accident. The Shrike had taken the others; the device
had been activated prematurely. Even in their confusion and
panic, the Ousters offered me refuge. | declined the offer
and turned my ship toward the Web. The Ousters did not
pursue.

| used my fatline transmitter to contact Gladstone and to
tell her that the Ouster agents had been eliminated. | told
her that the invasion was very likely, that the trap would be
Sprung as planned. | did not tell her about the device.
Gladstone congratulated me and called me home. |I
declined. | told her that | needed silence and solitude. |
turned my ship toward the Outback world nearest the
Hyperion system, knowing that travel itself would eat time
until the next act commenced.

Later, when the fatline call to pilgrimage came from
Gladstone herself, | knew the role the Ousters had planned
for me in these final days: the Ousters, or the Core, or
Gladstone and her machinations. It no longer matters who
consider themselves the masters of events. Events no
longer obey their masters.

The world as we know it is ending, my friends, no matter
what happens to us. As for me, | have no request of the
Shrike. | bring no final words for it or the universe. | have
returned because | must, because this is my fate. I’ve
known what I must do since | was a child, returning alone to
Siri's tomb and swearing vengeance on the Hegemony. I’ve
known what price | must pay, both in life and in history.

But when the time comes to judge, to understand a
betrayal which will spread like flame across the Web, which
will end worlds, | ask you not to think of me—my name was
not even writ on water as your lost poet’s soul said—but to
think of Old Earth dying for no reason, to think of the
dolphins, their gray flesh drying and rotting in the sun, to
see—as | have seen—the motile isles with no place to
wander, their feeding grounds destroyed, the Equatorial
Shallows scabbed with drilling platforms, the islands
themselves burdened with shouting, trammeling tourists
smelling of UV lotion and cannabis.

Or better yet, think of none of that. Stand as | did after
throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud,
feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held
high, fist raised against the sky, crying “A plague on both
your houses!”

For you see, | remember my grandmother’s dream. |
remember the way it could have been.

I remember Siri.

“Are you the spy?” asked Father Hoyt. “The Ouster spy?”

The Consul rubbed his cheeks and said nothing. He looked
tired, spent.

“Yeah,” said Martin Silenus. “CEO Gladstone warned me
when | was chosen for the pilgrimage. She said that there
was a spy.”

“She told all of us,” Snapped Brawne Lamia. She stared at
the Consul. Her gaze seemed sad.

“Our friend is a spy,” said Sol Weintraub, “but not merely
an Ouster spy.” The baby had awakened. Weintraub lifted
her to calm her crying. “He is what they call in the thrillers a
double agent, a triple agent in this case, an agent to infinite
regression. In truth, an agent of retribution.”

The Consul looked at the old scholar.

“He’s still a spy,” said Silenus. “Spies are executed, aren’t
they?”

Colonel Kassad had the death wand in his hand. It was not
aimed in anyone’s direction. “Are you in touch with your
ship?” he asked the Consul.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Through Siri’s comlog. It was ... modified.”

Kassad nodded slightly. “And you’ve been in touch with
the Ousters via the ship’s fatline transmitter?”

“Yes.”

“Making reports on the pilgrimage as they expected?”

“Yes.”

“Have they replied?”

“No.”

“How can we believe him?” cried the poet. “He’s a fucking
spy.”

“Shut up,” Colonel Kassad said flatly, finally. His gaze
never left the Consul. “Did you attack Het Masteen?”

“No,” said the Consul. “But when the Yggdrasill burned, |
knew that something was wrong.”

“What do you mean?” said Kassad.

The Consul cleared his throat. “lve spent time with
Templar Voices of the Tree. Their connection to their
treeships is almost telepathic. Masteen’s reaction was far too
subdued. Either he wasn’t what he said he was, or he had
known that the ship was to be destroyed and had severed
contact with it. When I was on guard duty, | went below to
confront him. He was gone. The cabin was as we found it,
except for the fact that the Mobius box was in a neutral
state. The erg could have escaped. | secured it and went
above.”

“You did not harm Hat Masteen?” Kassad asked again.

“No.”

“| repeat, why the fuck should we believe you?” said
Silenus. The poet was drinking Scotch from the last bottle he

had brought along.

The Consul looked at the bottle as he answered. “You have
no reason to believe me. It doesn’t matter.”

Colonel Kassad’s long fingers idly tapped the dull casing of
the deathwand. “What will you do with your fatline
commlink now?”

The Consul took a tired breath. “Report when the Time
Tombs open. If I’m still alive then.”

Brawne Lamia pointed at the antique comlog. “We could
destroy it.”

The Consul shrugged.

“It could be of use,” said the Colonel. “We can eavesdrop
on military and civilian transmissions made in the clear. If
we have to, we can call the Consul’s ship.”

“No!” cried the Consul. It was the first time he had shown
emotion in many minutes. “We can’t turn back now.”

“I believe we have no intention of turning back,” said
Colonel Kassad. He looked around at pale faces. No one
spoke for a moment.

“There is a decision we have to make,” said Sol Weintraub.
He rocked his infant and nodded in the direction of the
Consul.

Martin Silenus had been resting his forehead on the mouth
of the empty bottle of Scotch. He looked up. “The penalty for
treason is death.” He giggled. “We’re all going to die within
a few hours anyway. Why not make our last act an
execution?”

Father Hoyt grimaced as a spasm of pain gripped him. He
touched his cracked lips with a trembling finger. “We’re not
a court.”

“Yes,” said Colonel Kassad, “we are.”

The Consul drew up his legs, rested his forearms on his
knees, and laced his fingers. “Decide then.” There was no
emotion in his voice.

Brawne Lamia had brought out her father’s automatic
pistol. Now she set it on the floor near where she sat. Her

eyes darted from the Consul to Kassad. “We're talking
treason here?” she said. “Treason toward what? None of us
except maybe the Colonel there is exactly a leading citizen.
We've all been kicked around by forces beyond our control.”

Sol Weintraub spoke directly to the Consul. “What you
have ignored, my friend, is that if Meina Gladstone and
elements of the Core chose you for the Ouster contact, they
knew very well what you would do. Perhaps they could not
have guessed that the Ousters had the means by which to
open the Tombs—although with the Als of the Core one can
never know—but they certainly knew that you would turn on
both societies, both camps which have injured your family. It
is all part of some bizarre plan. You were no more an
instrument of your own will than was”—he held the baby up
— “this child.”

The Consul looked confused. He started to speak, shook
his head instead.

“That may be correct,” said Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, “but
however they may try to use all of us as pawns, we must
attempt to choose our own actions.” He glanced up at the
wall where pulses of light from the distant space battle
painted the plaster blood red. “Because of this war,
thousands will die. Perhaps millions. If the Ousters or the
Shrike gain access to the Web’s farcaster system, billions of
lives on hundreds of worlds are at risk.”

The Consul watched as Kassad raised the death wand.

“This would be faster for all of us,” said Kassad. “The
Shrike knows no mercy.”

No one spoke. The Consul seemed to be staring at
something at a great distance.

Kassad pressed on the safety and set the wand back in his
belt. “We’ve come this far,” he said. “We will go the rest of
the way together.”

Brawne Lamia put away her father’s pistol, rose, crossed
the small space, knelt next to the Consul, and put her arms

around him. Startled, the Consul raised one arm. Light
danced on the wall behind them.

A moment later, Sol Weintraub came close and hugged
them both with one arm around their shoulders. The baby
wriggled in pleasure at the sudden warmth of bodies. The
Consul smelled the talc-and-newborn scent of her.

“| was wrong,” said the Consul. “I will make a request of
the Shrike. | will ask for her.” He gently touched Rachel’s
head where the small skull curved in to neck.

Martin Silenus made a noise which began as a laugh and
died as a sob. “Our last requests,” he said. “Does the muse
grant requests? | have no request. | want only for the poem
to be finished.”

Father Hoyt turned toward the poet. “Is it so important?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes” gasped Silenus. He dropped the
empty Scotch bottle, reached into his bag, and lifted out a
handful of flimsies, holding them high as if offering them to
the group. “Do you want to read it? Do you want me to read
it to you? It’s flowing again. Read the old parts. Read the
Cantos | wrote three centuries ago and never published. It’s
all here. We’re all here. My name, yours, this trip. Don’t you
see ... I’m not creating a poem, I’m creating the future!” He
let the flimsies fall, raised the empty bottle, frowned, and
held it like a chalice. “I’m creating the future,” he repeated
without looking up, “but it’s the past which must be
changed. One instant. One decision.”

Martin Silenus raised his face. His eyes were red. “This
thing that is going to kill us tomorrow—my muse, our maker,
our unmaker—it’s traveled back through time. Well, let it.
This time, let it take me and leave Billy alone. Let it take me
and let the poem end there, unfinished for all time.” He
raised the bottle higher, closed his eyes, and threw it
against the far wall. Glass shards reflected orange light from
the silent explosions.

Colonel Kassad stepped closer and laid long fingers on the
poet’s shoulder.

For a few seconds the room seemed warmed by the mere
fact of human contact. Father Lenar Hoyt stepped away from
the wall where he had been leaning, raised his right hand
with thumb and little finger touching, three fingers raised,
the gesture somehow including himself as well as those
before him, and said softly, “Ego te absolvo.”

Wind scraped at the outer walls and whistled around the
gargoyles and balconies. Light from a battle a hundred
million kilometers away painted the group in blood hues.

Colonel Kassad walked to the doorway. The group moved
apart.

“Let’s try to get some sleep,” said Brawne Lamia.

Later, alone in his bedroll, listening to the wind shriek and
howl, the Consul set his cheek against his pack and pulled
the rough blanket higher. It had been years since he had
been able to fall asleep easily.

The Consul set his curled fist against his cheek, closed his
eyes, and slept.

EPILOGUE

The Consul awoke to the sound of a balalaika being played
so softly that at first he thought it was an undercurrent of
his dream.

The Consul rose, shivered in the cold air, wrapped his
blanket around him, and went out onto the long balcony. It
was not yet dawn. The skies still burned with the light of
battle.

“I’m sorry,” said Lenar Hoyt, looking up from his
instrument. The priest was huddled deep in his cape.

“It’s all right,” said the Consul. “I was ready to awaken.” It
was true. He could not remember feeling more rested.
“Please continue,” he said. The notes were sharp and clear
but barely audible above the wind noise. It was as if Hoyt
was playing a duet with the cold wind from the peaks above.
The Consul found the clarity almost painful.

Brawne Lamia and Colonel Kassad came out. A minute
later Sol Weintraub joined them. Rachel twisted in his arms,
reaching toward the night sky as if she could grasp the
bright blossoms there.

Hoyt played. The wind was rising in the hour before dawn,
and the gargoyles and escarpments acted like reeds to the
Keep’s cold bassoon.

Martin Silenus emerged, holding his head. “No fucking
respect for a hangover,” he said. He leaned on the broad
railing. “If | barf from this height, it'll be half an hour before
the vomitus lands.”

Father Hoyt did not look up. His fingers flew across the
strings of the small instrument. The northwest wind grew
stronger and colder and the balalaika played counterpart, its

notes warm and alive. The Consul and the others huddled in
blankets and capes as the breeze grew to a torrent and the
unnamed music kept pace with it. It was the strangest and
most beautiful symphony the Consul had ever heard.

The wind gusted, roared, peaked, and died. Hoyt ended his
tune.

Brawne Lamia looked around. “It’s almost dawn.”

“We have another hour,” said Colonel Kassad.

Lamia shrugged. “Why wait?”

“Why indeed?” said Sol Weintraub. He looked to the east
where the only hint of sunrise was the faintest of palings in
constellations there. “It looks like a good day is coming.”

“Let’s get ready,” said Hoyt. “Do we need our luggage?”

The group looked at one another.

“No, | think not,” said the Consul. “The Colonel will bring
the comlog with the fatline communicator. Bring anything
necessary for your audience with the Shrike. Well leave the
rest of the stuff here.”

“All right,” said Brawne Lamia, turning back from the dark
doorway, gesturing toward the others, “let’s do it.”

There were six hundred and sixty-one steps from the
northeast portal of the Keep to the moor below. There were
no railings. The group descended carefully, watching their
step in the insecure light.

Once onto the valley floor, they looked back at the outcrop
of stone above. Chronos Keep looked like part of the
mountain, its balconies and external stairways mere slashes
in the rock. Occasionally a brighter explosion would
illuminate a window or throw a gargoyle shadow, but except
for those instances it was as if the Keep had vanished
behind them.

They crossed the low hills below the Keep, staying on
grass and avoiding the sharp shrubs which extended thorns

like claws. In ten minutes they had crossed to sand and were
descending low dunes toward the valley.

Brawne Lamia led the group. She wore her finest cape and
a red silk suit with black trim. Her comlog gleamed on her
wrist. Colonel Kassad came next. He was in full battle armor,
Camouflage polymer not yet activated so the suit looked
matte black, absorbing even the light from above. Kassad
carried a standard-issue FORCE assault rifle. His visor
gleamed like a black mirror.

Father Hoyt wore his black cape, black suit, and clerical
collar. The balalaika was cradled in his arms like a child. He
continued to set his feet carefully, as if each step caused
pain. The Consul followed. He was dressed in his diplomatic
best, starched blouse, formal black trousers and demi-jacket,
velvet cape, and the gold tricorne he had worn the first day
on the treeship. He had to keep a grip on the hat against the
wind that had come up again, hurling grains of sand in his
face and sliding across the dune tops like a serpent. Martin
Silenus followed close behind in his coat of wind-rippled fur.

Sol Weintraub brought up the rear. Rachel rode in the
infant carrier, nestled under the cape and coat against her
father’s chest. Weintraub was singing a low tune to her, the
notes lost in the breeze.

Forty minutes out and they had come even with the dead
city. Marble and granite gleamed in the violent light. The
peaks glowed behind them, the Keep indistinguishable from
the other mountainsides. The group crossed a sandy vale,
climbed a low dune, and suddenly the head of the valley of
the Time Tombs was visible for the first time. The Consul
could make out the thrust of the Sphinx’s wings and a glow
of jade.

A rumble and crash from far behind them made the Consul
turn, startled, his heart pounding.

“Is it beginning?” asked Lamia. “The bombardment?”

“No, look,” said Kassad. He pointed to a point above the
mountain peaks where blackness obliterated the stars.

Lightning exploded along that false horizon, illuminating
icefields and glaciers. “Only a storm,” he said.

They resumed their trek across vermilion sands. The
Consul found himself straining to make out the shape of a
figure near the Tombs or at the head of the valley. He was
certain beyond all certainty that something awaited them
there ... that it awaited.

“Look at that,” said Brawne Lamia, her whisper almost lost
in the wind.

The Time Tombs were glowing. What the Consul had first
taken to be light reflected from above was not. Each Tomb
glowed a different hue and each was clearly visible now, the
glow brightening, the Tombs receding far back into the
darkness of the valley. The air smelled of ozone.

“Is that a common phenomenon?” asked Father Hoyt, his
voice thin.

The Consul shook his head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It had never been reported at the time Rachel came to
study the Tombs,” said Sol Weintraub. He began to hum the
low tune as the group started forward again through shifting
sands.

They paused at the head of the valley. Soft dunes gave
way to rock and ink-black shadows at the swale which led
down to the glowing Tombs. No one led the way. No one
spoke. The Consul felt his heart beating wildly against his
ribs. Worse than fear or knowledge of what lay below was
the blackness of spirit which seemed to have come into him
on the wind, chilling him and making him want to run
screaming toward the hills from which they had come.

The Consul turned to Sol Weintraub. “What’s that tune
you’re singing to Rachel?”

The scholar forced a grin and scratched his short beard.
“It’s from an ancient flat film. Pre-Hegira. Hell, it’s pre-
everything.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Brawne Lamia, understanding what the
Consul was doing. Her face was very pale.

Weintraub sang it, his voice thin and barely audible at
first. But the tune was forceful and oddly compelling. Father
Hoyt uncradled the balalaika and played along, the notes
gaining confidence.

Brawne Lamia laughed. Martin Silenus said in awe, “My
God, | used to sing this in my childhood. It’s ancient.”

“But who is the wizard?” asked Colonel Kassad, the
amplified voice through his helmet oddly amusing in this
context.

“And what is Oz?” asked Lamia.

“And just who is off to see this wizard?” asked the Consul,
feeling the black panic in him fade ever so slightly.

Sol Weintraub paused and tried to answer their questions,
explaining the plot of a flat film which had been dust for
centuries.

“Never mind,” said Brawne Lamia. “You can tell us later.
Just sing it again.”

Behind them, the darkness had engulfed the mountains as
the storm swept down and across the moors toward them.
The sky continued to bleed light but now the eastern
horizon had paled slightly more than the rest. The dead city
glowed to their left like stone teeth.

Brawne Lamia took the lead again. Sol Weintraub sang
more loudly, Rachel wiggling in delight. Lenar Hoyt threw
back his cape so as to better play the balalaika. Martin
Silenus threw an empty bottle far out onto the sands and
sang along, his deep voice surprisingly strong and pleasant
above the wind.

Fedmahn Kassad pushed up his visor, shouldered his
weapon, and joined in the chorus. The Consul started to
sing, thought about the absurd lyrics, laughed aloud, and
started again.

Just where the darkness began, the trail broadened. The
Consul moved to his right, Kassad joining him, Sol Weintraub
filling the gap, so that instead of a single-file procession, the
six adults were walking abreast. Brawne Lamia took

Silenus’s hand in hers, joined hands with Sol on the other
side.

Still singing loudly, not looking back, matching stride for
stride, they descended into the valley.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAN SIMMONS'’s first novel, Song of Kali, won the World
Fantasy Award, his science fiction novel Hyperion received
the Hugo, and the Horror Writers of America awarded him its
highest honor for his novel Carrion Comfort. Simmons is also
the author of Phases of Gravity, Hugo and Nebula Awards
finalist The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man, and two
collections of short fiction, Prayers to Broken Stones and
Lovedeath. He lives in Colorado along the front range of the
Rockies.

n UNA

Turn the page for a special preview of

ENDYMION

by
Dan Simmons

D2" Simmon’s brilliant novels Hyperion and The Fall of
Hyperion are among the most thunderously applauded
science fiction creations of recent years. Now the author
returns to the world of Hyperion to complete the tale of
mankind’s destiny among the stars. Endymion begins 247
years after the events of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion.
In the opening scenes, previewed here, you will see how
Shepherd Raul Endymion becomes a convicted murderer.
Soon the ancient poet Martin Silenius will choose the
discredited Endymion to be the bodyguard to the next
messiah: Aenea, the girl who stepped backward in time in
Hyperion, whose message will change humankind’s fate.
This novel, along with its companion volume, The Rise of
Endymion, is woven across the fabric of a hundred worlds
and a fantastic mix of races and individuals rarely
encountered in a single tale—including, of course, the
horrifying Shrike, part prophet and part killing machine,
whose origin and purpose will at long last be revealed.
Don’t miss ENDYMION, from Bantam Spectra Books.

ONE

You are reading this for the wrong reason.

If you are reading this to learn what it was like to make
love to a messiah—our messiah—then you should not read
on because you are little more than a voyeur.

If you are reading this because you are a fan of the Old
Poet’s Cantos and are obsessed with curiosity about what
happened next in the lives of the Hyperion pilgrims, you will
be disappointed. | do not know what happened to most of
them. They lived and died more than two centuries before |
was born.

If you are reading this because you seek more insight into
the message from the One Who Teaches, you may also be
disappointed. | confess that | was more interested in her as a
woman than as a teacher or messiah.

Finally, if you are reading this to discover her fate or even
my fate, you are reading the wrong document. Although
both our fates seem as certain as anyone’s could be, | was
not with her when hers was played out, and my own awaits
the final act even as | write these words.

If you are reading this at all, | would be amazed. But this
would not be the first time that events have amazed me.
The past few years have been one improbability after
another, each more marvelous and seemingly inevitable
than the last. To share these memories is the reason that |
am writing. Perhaps the motivation is not even to share—
knowing that the document | am creating almost certainly
will never be found—but just to put down the series of
events so that | can structure them in my own mind.

“How do I know what | think until | see what | say?” wrote
some pre-Hegira writer. Precisely. | must see these things in
order to know what to think of them. | must see the events
turned to ink and the emotions in print to believe that they
actually occurred and touched me.

If you are reading this for the same reason that | am
writing it—to bring some pattern out of the chaos of the last
years, to impose some order on the essentially random
series of events that have ruled our lives for the past
standard decades—then you may be reading this for the
right reason after all.

Where to start? With a death sentence, perhaps. But whose
—my death sentence or hers? And if mine, which of mine?
There are several from which to choose. Perhaps this final
one is appropriate. Begin at the ending.

| am writing this in a Schrodinger cat box in high orbit
around the quarantined world of Armaghast. The cat box is
not much of a box, more of a smooth-hulled ovoid a mere six
meters by three meters. It will be my entire world until the
end of my life. Most of the interior of my world is a spartan
cell consisting of a black-box air and waste recycler, my
bunk, the food synthesizer unit, a narrow counter that
serves as both my dining table and writing desk, and finally
the toilet, sink, and shower, which are set behind a
fiberplastic partition for reasons of propriety that escape me.
No one will ever visit me here. Privacy seems a hollow joke.

| have a text slate and stylus. When | finish each page, |
transfer it to hard copy on microvellum produced by the
recycler. The low accretion of wafer-thin pages is the only
visible change in my environment from day to day.

The vial of poison gas is not visible. It is set in the static-
dynamic shell of the cat box, linked to the air filtration unit
in such a way that to attempt to fiddle with it would trigger
the cyanide, as would any attempt to breech the shell itself.

The radiation detector, its timer, and the isotope element
are also fused into the frozen energy of the shell. | never
know when the random timer activates the detector. | never
know when the same random timing element opens the lead
shielding to the tiny isotope. | never know when the isotope
yields a particle.

But | will know when the detector is activated at the
instant the isotope yields a particle. There should be the
scent of bitter almonds in that second or two before the gas
kills me.

| hope that it will be only a second or two.

Technically, according to the ancient enigma of quantum
physics, | am now neither dead nor alive. | am in the
suspended state of overlapping probability waves once
reserved for the cat in Schrodinger’s thought experiment.
Because the hull of the cat box is little more than position-
fused energy ready to explode at the slightest intrusion, no
one will ever look inside to see if | am dead or alive.
Theoretically, no one is directly responsible for my
execution, since the immutable laws of quantum theory
pardon or condemn me from each microsecond to the next.
There are no observers.

But / am an observer. / am waiting for this particular
collapse of probability waves with something more than
detached interest. In the instant after the hissing of cyanide
gas begins but before it reaches my lungs and heart and
brain, / will Know which way the universe has chosen to sort
itself out.

At least | will know so far as | am concerned. Which, when
it comes right down to it, is the only aspect of the universe’s
resolution with which most of us are concerned.

And in the meantime, | eat and sleep and void waste and
breathe and go through the full daily ritual of the ultimately
forgettable. Which is ironic, since right now | live—if live is
the correct word—only to remember. And to write about
what | remember.

If you are reading this, you are almost certainly reading it
for the wrong reason. But as with so many things in our
lives, the reason for doing something is not the important
thing. It is the fact of doing that remains. Only the
immutable facts that | have written this and you are reading
it remain important in the end.

Where to begin? With her? She is the one you want to read
about and the one person in my life whom | wish to
remember above everything and everyone else. But perhaps
| should begin with the events which led me to her and then
to here by way of much of this galaxy and beyond.

| believe that | shall begin with the beginning—with my
first death sentence.

TWO

My name is Raul Endymion. My first name rhymes with
Paul. | was born on the world of Hyperion in the year 693 apc
on our local calendar, or 3099 ad, pre-Hegira reckoning, or,
as most of us figure time in the era of the Pax, 247 years
after the Fall.

It was said about me when | traveled with the One Who
Teaches that | had been a shepherd, and this was true.
Almost. My family had made its living as itinerant shepherds
in the moors and meadows of the remoter regions on the
continent of Aquila where | was raised, and | sometimes
tended sheep as a child. | remember those calm nights
under the starry skies of Hyperion as a pleasant time. When |
was sixteen (by Hyperion’s calendar) | ran away from home
and enlisted as a soldier of the Pax-controlled home guard.
Most of those three years | remember only as a dull routine
of boredom with the unpleasant exception of the four
months when | was sent to the Claw Iceshelf to fight

indigenies during the Ursus uprising. After being mustered
out of the home guard, | worked as a bouncer and blackjack
dealer in one of the rougher Nine Tails casinos, served as a
bargemaster on the upper reaches of the Kans for two rainy
seasons, and then trained as a gardener on some of the
Beak estates under the landscape artist Avrol Hume. But
“shepherd” must have sounded better to the chroniclers of
the One Who Teaches when it came time to list the former
occupation of her closest disciple. “Shepherd” has a nice
biblical ring to it.

| do not object to the title of shepherd. But in this tale, |
will be seen as a shepherd whose flock consisted of one
infinitely important sheep. And | lost her more than | found
her.

At the time my life changed forever and this story really
begins, | was twenty-seven years old, tall for a Hyperion-
born, notable for little except for the thickness of calluses on
my hands and my love of quirky ideas, and was then
working as a hunter’s guide in the fens above Toschahi Bay a
hundred kilometers north of Port Romance. By that time in
my life | had learned a little bit about sex and much about
weapons, had discovered firsthand the power greed has in
the affairs of men and women, had learned how to use my
fists and modest wits in order to Survive, was curious about a
great many things, and felt secure only in the knowledge
that the remainder of my life would almost certainly hold no
great surprises.

| was an idiot.

Most of what | was that autumn of my twenty-seventh year
might be described in negatives. | had never been off
Hyperion and never considered that | might travel offworld. |
had been in Church cathedrals, of course—even in the
remote regions where my family had fled after the sacking of
the city of Endymion a century ago, the Pax had extended
its civilizing influence—but | had accepted neither the
catechism nor the cross. | had been with women, but | had

never been in love. Except for my grandmother’s tutelage,
my education had been self-directed and acquired through
books. | read voraciously. At age twenty-seven, | thought
that | knew everything.

| knew nothing.

So it was that in the early autumn of my twenty-seventh
year, content in my ignorance and stolid in my conviction
that nothing of importance would ever change, | committed
the act that would earn me a death sentence and begin my
real life;

$% ¢ è

The fens above Toschahi Bay are dangerous and unhealthy,
unchanged since long before the Fall, but hundreds of
wealthy hunters—many from offworld—come there every
year for the ducks. Most of the proto-mallards died off
quickly after their regeneration and release from the
seedship seven centuries earlier, either unable to adapt to
Hyperion’s climate or stalked by its indigenie predators, but
a few ducks survived in the fens of north-central Aquila. And
the hunters came. And I guided them.

Four of us worked out of an abandoned fiberplastic
plantation set on a narrow thumb of shale and mud between
the fens and a tributary to the Kans River. The other three
guides concentrated on fishing and big-game hunting, but |
had the plantation and most of the fens to myself during
duck season. The fens are a semi-tropical marsh area
consisting mostly of thick chalma growth, weirwood forest,
and more temperate stands of giant Prometheus in the rocky
areas above the flood plain, but during the crisp, dry cold
snap of early autumn, the mallards pause there on their
migration from the southern islands to their lakes in the
remotest regions of the Pinion Plateau.

| woke the four “hunters” an hour and a half before dawn. |
had fixed a breakfast of jambon, toast, and coffee, but the
four overweight businessmen grumbled and cursed as they

wolfed it down. | had to remind them to check and clean
their weapons: three carried shotguns and the fourth was
foolish enough to bring an antique energy rifle. As they
grumbled and ate, | went out behind the shack and sat with
Izzy, the Labrador retriever I’d had since she was a pup. Izzy
knew that we were going hunting and | had to stroke her
head and neck to calm her down.

First light was coming up just as we left the overgrown
plantation grounds and poled off in a flat-bottomed skiff.
Radiant gossamers visible flitting through dark tunnels of
branches above the trees. The hunters—M. Rolman, M.
Herrig, M. Rushomin, and M. Poneascu—sat forward on the
thwarts while | poled. Izzy and | were separated from them
by the heap of floatblinds stacked between us, the curved
bottoms of the disks still showing the rough matting of the
fiberplastic husk. Rolman and Herrig were wearing
expensive chameleon-cloth ponchos, although they did not
activate the polymer until we were deep in the swamp. |
asked them to quit talking so loudly as we approached the
freshwater fens where the mallards would be setting in. All
four men glared at me, but they lowered their voices and
soon fell silent.

The light was almost strong enough to read by when |
stopped the skiff just outside the shooting fen and floated
their blinds. | hitched up my well-patched waterproofs and
slid into the chest-deep water. Izzy leaned over the side of
the skiff, eyes bright, but | flashed a hand signal to restrain
her from jumping in. She quivered but sat back.

“Give me your gun, please,” | said to M. Poneascu, the first
man. These once-a-year hunters had enough trouble just
keeping their balance while getting into the small
floatblinds; | did not trust them to hang on to their shotguns.
| had asked them to keep the chamber empty and the safety
on, but when Poneascu handed his weapon over, the
chamber indicator glowed red for loaded and the safety was
off. | ejected the shell, clicked the safety on, set the gun in

the waterproof carrier strapped across my shoulders, and
steadied the floatblind while the heavy-set man stepped
from the skiff.

“Ill be right back,” | said softly to the other three and
began wading through chalma fronds, pulling the blind
along by the harness strap. | could have had the hunters
pole their floatblinds to a place of their own choosing, but
the fen was riddled with quickmud cysts that would pull
down both pole and poler, populated by dracula ticks the
size of blood-filled balloons that like to drop on moving
objects from overhead branches, decorated with hanging
ribbon snakes which looked precisely like chalma fronds to
the unwary, and rife with fighting gar that could bite
through a finger. There were other Surprises for first-time
visitors. Besides, l’d learned from experience that most of
these weekend hunters would position their floats so that
they would be shooting at each other as soon as the first
flight of mallards appeared. It was my job to keep that from
happening.

| parked Poneascu in a concealing curl of fronds with a
good view from the south mudbank of the largest body of
open water, showed him where | was going to place the
other floatblinds, told him to watch from within the slit of the
floatblind canvas and not to begin shooting until everyone
was placed, and then went back for the other three. | placed
Rushomin about twenty meters to the first man’s right,
found a good place closer to the inlet for Rolman, and then
went back for the man with the idiot energy weapon. M.
Herrig.

The sun would be up in another ten minutes.

“About crossdamned time you fucking remembered me,”
Snapped the fat man as | waded back to him. He’d already
gotten onto his float; his chameleon cloth trousers were wet.
Methane bubbles between the skiff and the mouth of the
inlet indicated a large mudcyst, so | had to work my way
close to the mudflat each time | came or went.

“We're not paying you to waste your crossdamn time like
this,” he growled from around a thick cigar.

| nodded, reached up, plucked the lighted cigar from
beneath his teeth, and tossed it away from the cyst. We were
lucky that the bubbles had not ignited. “Ducks can smell the
smoke,” | said, ignoring his gaping mouth and reddening
face.

| slipped into the harness and pulled his float into the
open fen, my chest cutting a path through the red and
orange algae that had covered the surface again since my
last trip.

M. Herrig fondled his expensive and useless energy rifle
and glared at me. “Boy, you watch your crossdamn mouth or
l'II crossdamn watch it for you,” he said. His poncho and
chameleon cloth hunting blouse were unsealed enough from
me to see the gleam of a gold pax double-cross hanging
around his neck and the red welt of the actual cruciform on
his upper chest. M. Herrig was a born-again Christian.

| said nothing until | had his float positioned properly to
the left of the inlet. All four of these experts could fire out
toward the pond now without fear of hitting one another.
“Pull your canvas around and watch from the slit,” | said,
untying the line from my harness and securing it around a
chalma root.

M. Herrig made a noise but left the camouflage canvas still
furled on the dome wands.

“Wait until I’ve got the decoys out before shooting,” | said.
| pointed out the other shooting positions. “And don’t fire
toward the inlet. l'II be there in the skiff.”

M. Herrig did not answer.

| shrugged and waded back to the skiff. Izzy was sitting
where | had commanded her to stay, but | could see from her
straining muscles and gleaming eyes that in spirit she was
bounding back and forth like a puppy. Without climbing into
the skiff, | rubbed her neck. “Just a few minutes now, girl,” |

whispered. Released from her stay command, she ran to the
bow as | began dragging the skiff toward the inlet.

The radiant gossamers had disappeared and the sky-
streaks of meteor showers were fading as the predawn light
solidified into a milky glow. The symphony of insect sounds
and the croak of amphisbands along the mudflats were
giving way to morning bird calls and the occasional gronk of
a gar inflating its challenge sac. The sky was deepening to
its daytime lapis in the east.

| pulled the skiff under fronds, gestured for Izzy to stay in
the bow, and pulled four of the decoys out from under the
thwarts. There was the slightest film of ice along the
Shoreline here, but the center of the fen was clear and |
began positioning the decoys, activating each one as | left it.
The water was never deeper than my chest.

| had just returned to the skiff and lay down next to Izzy
under the concealing fronds when the ducks arrived. Izzy
heard them first. Her entire body went rigid and her nose
came up as if she could sniff them on the wind. A second
later there came the whisper of wings. | leaned forward and
peered through the brittle foliage.

In the center of the pond, the decoys were swimming and
preening. One of them arched its neck and called just as the
real mallards became visible above the treeline to the south.
A flight of three ducks swept out of their pattern, extended
wings to brake, and came sliding down invisible rails toward
the fen.

| felt the usual thrill | always encounter at such moments:
my throat tightens and my heart pounds, seems to stop for a
moment, and then palpably aches. | had spent most of my
life in remote regions, observing nature, but confrontation
with such beauty always touched something so deep in me
that | had no words for it. Beside me, Izzy was as still and
rigid as an ebony statue.

The gunfire started then. The three with shotguns opened
up at once and kept firing as quickly as they could eject

Shells. The energy rifle sliced its beam across the fen, the
narrow shaft of violet light clearly visible in the morning
mists.

The first duck must have been hit by two or three patterns
at once: it flew apart in an explosion of feathers and viscera.
The second one’s wings folded and it dropped, all grace and
beauty blasted out of it. The third mallard slipped to its
right, recovered just above the water, and beat its wings for
altitude. The energy beam slashed after it, slicing through
leaves and branches like a silent scythe. Shotguns roared
again, but the mallard seemed to anticipate their aim. The
bird dove toward the lake, banked hard right, and flew
straight toward the inlet.

Straight toward Izzy and me.

The bird was no more than two meters above the water. Its
wings were beating strongly, its entire form was bent to the
purpose of escape, and | realized that it was going to fly
under the trees right through the inlet opening. Despite the
fact that the bird’s unusual flight pattern had taken it
between several shooting positions, all four men were still
firing.

| used my right leg to push the skiff out of the concealing
branches. “Cease fire!” | shouted in a command-voice that
ld acquired during my brief career as a sergeant in the
home guard. Two of the men did. One shotgun and the
energy rifle continued firing. The mallard never wavered as
it passed the skiff a meter to our left.

Izzy’s body quivered and her mouth seemed to drop
farther open in surprise as the duck flapped low past us. The
shotgun did not fire again, but | could see the violet beam
panning toward us through the rising mists. | shouted and
pulled Izzy down between the thwarts.

The mallard escaped the tunnel of chalma branches
behind us and beat its wings for altitude. Suddenly the air
smelled of ozone and a perfectly straight line of flame
slashed across the stern of the boat. | threw myself flat

against the bottom of the skiff, grabbing Izzy’s collar and
tugging her closer as | did so.

The violet beam missed my curled fingers and Izzy’s collar
by a millimeter. | saw the briefest glimmer of a quizzical look
in Izzy’s excited eyes, and then she tried to lower her head
to my chest the way she had as a puppy when she acted
penitent. At the movement, her head and the section of
neck above her collar separated from her body and went
over the side with a soft splash. | still held the collar and her
weight was still on me, her forepaws still quivering against
my chest. Then blood geysered out over me from arteries in
the cleanly severed neck and | rolled aside, pushing the
Sspasming, headless body of my dog away from me. Her
blood was warm and it tasted of copper.

The energy beam slashed back again, cut a heavy chalma
branch from its trunk a meter away from the skiff, and then
switched off as if it had never existed.

| sat up and looked across the pond at M. Herrig. The fat
man was lighting a cigar; the energy rifle lay across his
knees. The smoke from his cigar mingled with the tendrils of
mist still rising from the fen.

| slipped over the side of the skiff into the chest-deep
water. Izzy’s! blood still swirled around me as | began
wading toward M. Herrig.

He lifted his energy rifle and held it across his chest in
port-arms as | approached. When he spoke, it was around
the cigar clenched between his teeth. “Well, are you going
out there to retrieve the ducks | got, or are you just going to
let them float out there until they ro...”

As soon as | was within arm’s length | grabbed the fat
man’s chameleon poncho with my left hand and jerked him
forward. He tried to raise the energy rifle but | seized it with
my right hand and flung it far out into the fen. M. Herrig
shouted something then, his cigar tumbled into the
floatblind, and | pulled him off his stool and into the water.
He came up spluttering and spitting algae and | hit him

once, very hard, squarely in the mouth. | felt the skin on my
knuckles tear as several of his teeth snapped, and then he
was sprawling backward. His head hit the frame of the
floatblind with a hollow bang, and he went under again.

| waited for his fat face to rise to the surface again like the
belly of some dead fish, and when it did | held it down,
watching the bubbles rise while his arms flailed and his
pudgy hands batted uselessly at my wrists. The other three
hunters began shouting from their shooting positions across
the fen. | ignored them.

When M. Herrig’s hands had dropped away and the stream
of bubbles had thinned to a weak trickle, | released him and
stepped back. For a moment | did not think that he was
going to come up, but then the fat man exploded to the
surface and hung on the edge of the float. He vomited water
and algae. | turned my back on him and waded across to the
others.

“That’s all for today,” | said. “Give me your guns. We're
going in.”

Each man opened his mouth as if to protest; each man
took a look at my eyes and blood-spattered face and handed
me his shotgun.

“Retrieve your friend,” | said to the last man, Poneascu. |
carried the weapons back to the skiff, unloaded them, sealed
the shotguns in the watertight compartment under the bow,
and carried the boxes of shells to the stern. Izzy’s headless
corpse had already begun to stiffen as | eased it over the
side. The bottom of the skiff was awash with her blood. |
went back to the stern, stowed the shells, and stood leaning
on the pole.

The three hunters returned eventually, awkwardly
paddling their own floats while pulling the one in which M.
Herrig was sprawled. The fat man was still hanging over the
side, his face pale. They climbed into the skiff and began
trying to pull the floats aboard.

“Leave them,” I said. “Tie them to the chalma root. lIl
come back for them later.”

They tied off the floats and pulled M. Herrig aboard like
some obese fish. The only sounds were the birds and insects
of the fen coming alive and M. Herrig’s continued retching.
When he was aboard, the other three hunters seated and
muttering, | poled us back to the plantation as the sun
burned through the last of the morning vapors rising from
the dark waters.

And that should have been the end of it. Except, of course,
it was not.

| was making lunch in the primitive kitchen when M. Herrig
came out of the sleeping barracks with a stubby, military
flechette gun. Such weapons were illegal on Hyperion; the
Pax allowed no one except the Home Guard to carry them. |
could see the white, shocked faces of the other three
hunters peering from the barracks door as M. Herrig
staggered into the kitchen amidst a fog of whiskey fumes.

The fat man could not resist the impulse to give a short,
melodramatic speech before killing me. “You crossdamned
heathen son-of-a-bitch ...” he began, but | did not stand
around to listen to the rest. | threw myself down and forward
even as he fired from the hip.

Six thousand steel flechettes blew apart the stove, the pan
of stew | had been cooking on the stove, the sink, the
window above the sink, and the shelves and crockery on the
Shelves. Food, plastic, porcelain, and glass showered over
my legs as | crawled under the open counter and reached for
M. Herrig’s legs even as he leaned over the counter to spray
me with a second burst of flechettes.

| grabbed the big man’s ankles and jerked. He went down
on his back with a crash that sent a decade’s worth of dust
rising from the floorboards. | clambered up over his legs,
kneeing him in the groin as | climbed, and grabbed his wrist

with the intention of forcing the gun out of his hands. He
had a firm grip on the stock; his finger was on the trigger.
The magazine whined softly as another flechette cartridge
clicked into place. | could smell M. Herrig’s whiskey-and-
cigar breath on my face as he grimaced triumphantly and
forced the weapon’s muzzle toward me. In one movement, |
slammed my forearm against his wrist and the heavy gun,
squeezing it tight under M. Herrig’s fleshy chins. Our eyes
met for the instant before his struggles made him complete
his squeeze of the trigger.

| told one of the other hunters how to use the radio in the
common room and a Pax security skimmer was setting down
on the grassy lawn within the hour. There were only a dozen
or so working skimmers on the continent, so the sight of the
black Pax vehicle was sobering, to say the least.

They banded my wrists, slapped a cortical come-along to
my temple, and hurried me into the holding box in the rear
of the vehicle. | sat there, dripping sweat in the hot stillness
of the box, while Pax-trained forensic specialists used
needle-nosed pliers to try and retrieve every shard of M.
Herrig’s skull and scattered brain tissue from the perforated
floor and wall. Then, when they had interrogated the other
hunters and had found as much of M. Herrig as they were
going to find, | watched through the scarred Perspex window
as they loaded his body-bagged corpse aboard the skimmer.
Lift blades whined, the ventilators allowed me a bit of cooler
air just as | thought | could no longer breathe, and the
skimmer rose, circled the plantation once, and flew south
toward Port Romance.

My trial was held six days later. Mssrs. Rolman, Rushomin,
and Poneascu testified that | had insulted M. Herrig on the
trip to the fen and then assaulted him there. They pointed
out that the hunting dog had been killed in the mélée that |
had begun. They testified that once back at the plantation, |

had brandished the illegal flechette gun and threatened to
kill all of them. M. Herrig had tried to take the weapon away
from me. | had shot him at point blank range, literally
blowing his head off in the process.

M. Herrig was the last to testify. Still shaken and pale from
his three-day resurrection, dressed in a somber business suit
and cape, his voice shook as he confirmed the other men’s
testimony and described my brutal assault on him. My court-
appointed attorney did not cross-examine him. As born-
again Christians in good standing with the Pax, none of the
four could be forced to testify under the influence of
Truthtell or any other chemical or electronic form of
verification. | volunteered to undergo Truthtell or fullscan,
but the prosecuting attorney protested that such gimmickry
was irrelevant and the Pax-approved judge agreed. My
counselor did not file a protest.

There was no jury. The judge took less than twenty
minutes to reach a verdict. | was guilty and sentenced to
execution by deathwand.

| stood and asked that the sentence be delayed until |
could get word to my aunt and cousins in north Aquila so
that they could visit me one last time. My request was
denied. The time of execution was set for sunrise on the
following day.